Bilateral Leverages and European Security (

Chapter 3

1969–70 Bilateral Leverages and European Security (

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Illustration 3: State Secretary Egon Bahr, Foreign Minister Walter Scheel and Chancellor Willy Brandt (from left to right) at a press conference in Moscow on 12 August 1970.

Presse- und Informationsamt der Bundesregierung, B 145 Bild-00106789, Photographer: Ludwig Wegmann.

“A State of Peace in Europe: West Germany and the CSCE, 1966-1975” by Petri Hakkarainen is available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license with support from Knowledge Unlatched. OA ISBN: 978-1-78920-107-9. Not for resale. 68 | A State of Peace in Europe

Brandt hopes to exploit the presumed Soviet interest in this project as a lever that may bring Moscow to put pressure on the East Germans to enter into negotiations with Bonn. – US Ambassador in Bonn, Kenneth Rush, on the CSCE, January 19701

We see in the CSE a means to safeguard peace, to reduce tension in the East– West relationship, and to overcome inner-German contradictions. – Position paper of the Auswärtiges Amt, May 19702

The pace of West German foreign policy during the first year of the Brandt Government was breathtaking to say the least. Before the end of 1970, the Federal Republic had concluded two cornerstone agreements of its bilateral Ostpolitik – the Moscow Treaty with the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Treaty with Poland. Official negotiating contacts had also been opened with the GDR, albeit so far with meagre results. On top of that, the Ambassadors of the United States, the United Kingdom, France and the Soviet Union had started their negotiations on the status of Berlin. All these new leaps for- ward in European détente and German Ostpolitik certainly kept the policy makers of the Federal Republic busy in the period covered in this chapter. But in spite of the understandable predominance of bilateral Ostpolitik, I will argue that the project of a European security conference also already figured on the political radar in Bonn. At first, the main emphasis in this respect was clearly on the instrumental use of the CSCE. As described in the preceding chapter, during the Grand Coalition the Auswärtiges Amt had developed meticulous plans for making use of the Soviet interest in the CSCE to receive concessions in return – in Ostpolitik in general and in Deutschlandpolitik in particular. Once in office, the Brandt Government did not hesitate to implement this linkage strategy. In the beginning, the atmosphere among the Western Allies was favourable for the linkage, and the Federal Republic felt relatively uninhibited in using the CSCE as a bargaining chip in its bilateral negotiations. Appropriately, it was above all Egon Bahr, the main architect of the ‘linkage’ idea, who had the opportunity to apply it in his negotiations in Moscow. But as soon as the leverage had been used once, its further application turned out to be problematic. On the other hand, I will argue that the instrumental value of the CSCE was already during this period supplemented by a genuine interest in the agenda of the conference. The potential of the CSCE as a valuable tool in its own right in pursuing German objectives was realised in Bonn early on. Initial efforts of the FRG to influence the conference agenda inthe multilateral Western preparations focused primarily on the inclusion of mutual and balanced force reductions. In the West German view, if a Eu- ropean security conference was truly to live up to its name, it could not ne- glect issues of hard security. The strong concentration on MBFR, however,

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partly blinded the Federal Republic from seeing other possibilities for the CSCE agenda. This continued to impair the West German CSCE preparations into the latter half of 1970, when theAuswärtiges Amt slowly began to have a broader perspective on the conference agenda.

Western Support for the Linkage of CSCE Plans with Deutschlandpolitik

Among the first messages sent out from the Auswärtiges Amt after the So- cial-Liberal Government had officially been sworn in was Foreign Minister Walter Scheel’s telegram to all FRG Ambassadors on 30 October 1969. Ex- plaining the government declaration Chancellor Willy Brandt had given to the Bundestag a few days earlier, Scheel’s instructions underscored three new elements in the Deutschlandpolitik of the new government. In addition to setting the goal of negotiating a ‘regulated special relationship’ with the GDR as a central priority and renouncing the automatic consequences for third countries recognising the GDR, as had been prescribed in the Hall- stein Doctrine, the instructions also introduced a new tactical approach. ‘We will attempt to use the question of the GDR’s external relations as a means to advance an inner-German modus vivendi.’ 3 As has been argued above, the Auswärtiges Amt had already during the end of the Grand Coalition held the view that an ‘improvement of climate’ between East and West – and particularly between the two German states – prior to the CSCE was an essential prerequisite for the success of the conference.4 This position was reflected also in a letter Hans Ruete, the Political Director of the Auswärtiges Amt, drafted for Brandt to send to the East German Prime Minister Willi Stoph immediately after the government declaration. Ruete’s draft had the Warsaw Pact calls for a security conference as its starting point. Having affirmed Bonn’s genuine interest in a CSCE, the letter stated that efforts to pave the way for such a conference should not be ‘additionally burdened by unregulated questions in the relationship between the two parts of Germany’.5 This argument, stressing the need to avoid ‘German quarrels’, was repeated by the Federal Republic, time and again, in discussions with their Western, Eastern and neutral counterparts during the autumn of 1969.6 On the working level many of the Auswärtiges Amt officials hesitated to go beyond this position. Although bilateral negotiations were Bonn’s top priority, the argument went, ‘the impression should be avoided that we are making a successful conclusion of those discussions an unconditional prerequisite’ for European security negotiations.7 It was, above all, the concern of potential isolation in the West and of being blamed for the fail-

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ure of the security conference that called for more careful formulations.8 Accordingly, in his first appearances as Foreign Minister, Walter Scheel preferred to refer to the possible bilateral contacts with the Soviet Union, Poland and the GDR as ‘test cases’, useful in estimating the possibilities of an eventual security conference, rather than presenting them strictly as formal preconditions.9 But in confidential discussions with their allies, top FRG officials referred to the growing pressure to open the doors of international organisations and conferences for the GDR. In particular, the momentum of the CSCE discussion was clearly increasing. At the end of October in Prague, the Warsaw Pact issued yet another declaration calling for a rapid convening of an all- European conference.10 If the CSCE was to be used as a bargaining chip for achieving some kind of inner-German solution, time was running out. As Ruete put it to a member of the British NATO delegation, ‘it was therefore necessary to use this bait fairly soon, or it might lose its value’.11 Thus, the ‘linkage’ policy began to be implemented more actively. In- stead of merely pointing to the favourable impact an inner-German rapprochement might have on the prospects of a CSCE, the FRG started to insist more openly that bilateral negotiations between Bonn and East Berlin were needed before a security conference could take place. This sent a new message to the Allies, as Haftendorn has accurately pointed out. Whereas some of the NATO members had at first been afraid that the FRG would move too far and too quickly in its Ostpolitik, they now started to suspect that the new Brandt Government wanted to put others’ détente policies on hold until it had found a suitable bilateral solution with East Berlin.12 Such suspicions, if they did exist, were not unfounded. In instructions sent out to several West German embassies in mid-November, Ruete stressed the intention of the Federal Government to ‘make use of the dynamics of the European security discussion and of the Eastern interest in a European security conference’ in order to achieve an inner-German settlement.13 In this context, it is worth mentioning that the East Germans were perfectly aware of these tactical considerations. In late December 1969, a memorandum prepared for the East German party leader Walter Ulbricht included lengthy verbatim quotations from Ruete’s instructions referred to above.14 Nevertheless, at a time when an official contact between Bonn and East Berlin had not yet been opened, it was in any case more important for the West Germans to convince their allies of the ‘linkage’ strategy. And as far as the major allies were concerned, it turned out to be anything but a hard sell. On 3 December, the Foreign Ministers of the FRG and the Three Powers met in Brussels for their traditional quadripartite get-together preceding the NATO ministerial meeting. Here the French Foreign Minister Mau-

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rice Schumann turned out to be the main advocate of the FRG’s linkage policy. Instead of being prepared to enter a CSCE without any preconditions whatsoever, Schumann argued, the FRG should at first demand progress in the various negotiations that were about to begin – bilateral West German-Soviet negotiations, Allied soundings on the status of Ber- lin, and inner-German talks. In Schumann’s words, ‘Germany was at the centre of this whole issue and it was for it to take the lead in formulating the conditions for Allied participation in a European Security Conference’. Since others in the quadripartite group more or less agreed with this view, the West German position was adopted without Scheel having to insist on it. On the contrary, in his statement Scheel continued to distance himself from setting firm preconditions, talking rather about the bilateral negotiations as ‘substantive prerequisites’ for a CSCE, testing the Soviets’ willingness to come to terms with the West at a possible conference.15 Following the quadripartite dinner, the NATO Foreign Ministers’ autumn meeting itself was unproblematic in this respect. Although the individual views that member states held of the CSCE varied considerably, with some of the smaller Allies seeing the conference in a more favourable light, there were no fundamental disagreements about the steps that were seen as the necessary preconditions for a conference.16 In the separate declaration on the future development of East–West relations, issued by the ministers in addition to the usual final communiqué, the Alliance supported the bilateral initiatives of the FRG as well as the efforts to improve the situation in Berlin. Regarding the security conference, the Brussels declaration in December 1969 stated:

Ministers consider that, as part of a comprehensive approach, progress in the bilateral and multilateral discussions and negotiations which have already begun, or could begin shortly, and which relate to fundamental problems of European security, would make a major contribution to improving the political atmosphere in Europe. Progress in these discussions and negotiations would help to ensure the success of any eventual conference.17

This circumspect statement could be – and was – interpreted in various ways. Some Allies saw the declaration, as Hartmut Mayer has argued, as a clear instruction for the FRG to achieve results on the German question in order to free the way for the security conference.18 This naturally applied in particular to those NATO members who were favourably inclined to the general idea of a CSCE. By contrast, those less enthusiastic about the conference project saw this as a means to procrastinate on the CSCE front as well as to control the pace of Brandt’s bilateral policies. In his memoirs, Henry Kissinger referred to the results of the NATO ministerial meeting in December 1969 as embedding Ostpolitik in a ‘matrix of negotiations’,

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including the CSCE. Kissinger argued that this matrix not only enhanced the bargaining position of the FRG, but also set limits beyond which it could not go without an Allied consensus.19 The interpretation in Bonn was different. In the discussions with the Three Powers and within the wider NATO framework in early December the FRG had been encouraged, almost persuaded, by others to take the lead in setting Western preconditions for a CSCE. The West Germans saw this as a clear mandate to implement their ‘linkage’ policy – to utilise the prospect of a CSCE for bilateral purposes. With this fillip to their self- confidence, the FRG approached the first real test of the linkage approach, the bilateral negotiations with the Soviet Union, with high hopes.

Horse-Trading in Moscow

The expectation, attached in Bonn to the CSCE, of it being a tactical tool in the bilateral negotiations with Moscow had been on the rise already before the December meeting of NATO. On 15 November 1969 Helmut Allardt, the FRG Ambassador in Moscow, delivered a verbal note from his government to the Soviet leadership, formally suggesting the opening of bilateral discussions about a renunciation of force between the Federal Republic and the Soviet Union.20 The following day, the Romanian Deputy Foreign Minister, Gheorghe Macovescu, assured Egon Bahr in one of their secret meetings that the security conference was the key to the Soviet Union: ‘If the Federal Republic takes a positive attitude to the security conference, it will get the Russians on its side’.21 And a long discussion Scheel had with the Soviet Ambassador in Bonn gave the Germans further testimony of the importance the Soviet Union attached to the CSCE.22 Equipped with this information, Chancellor Brandt felt encouraged to raise the security conference as one of the central issues of his letter to the Soviet Prime Minister Alexei Kosygin on 19 November. In this letter, pleading for the importance of bilateral renunciation-of-force agreements between the FRG and the Soviet Union, Poland and the GDR, Brandt also established a direct connection between these agreements and the prospects of a European security conference. In Brandt’s view, these bilateral agreements could set an important example for the conference and, after their conclusion, ‘flow into a multilateral renunciation of force’.23 In his memoirs Bahr has underscored the significance of this letter, which in his view presented the ‘contours of the programme leading all the way to 1975 in Helsinki’. Moreover, Bahr writes that the US President, Richard Nixon, who was confidentially informed about the contents of the letter,

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expressed his gratitude to the Germans for holding back the process towards a CSCE with it.24 But Brandt’s letter also shows the understandable limitations the Ger- mans faced in pursuing their strategy. In dealing with a superpower, imposing inflexible and unconditional preconditions was hardly a good opening move for the FRG. Answering questions in the Foreign Policy Committee of the Bundestag on 11 December, Foreign Minister Scheel admitted this rather frankly. Although the Federal Republic for the time being preferred bilateral East–West talks over multilateral ones, Scheel explained, ‘we cannot make a condition out of it. That would endanger our own negotiations.’25 The linkage had to be presented in slightly more subtle terms. As the bilateral West German–Soviet contacts were opened in December 1969 with three meetings between Ambassador Allardt and Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko in Moscow, Allardt was consistently instructed to refer to the favourable impact that progress in and conclusion of the bilateral negotiations – with the Soviet Union, Poland and the GDR – as well as the Berlin talks would have for the prospects of a European security conference. According to the instructions, the Federal Government did not want to impose an immediate link between the bilateral and multilateral processes, but insisted on seeing an ‘inner connection’ between them.26 Yet sensitivity to such subtle messages at the negotiating table was hardly among the virtues of Gromyko. In his first two meetings with Allardt, the Soviet Foreign Minister responded furiously to any suggested connections between the CSCE and other negotiations, warning the Germans not to create ‘artificial difficulties’ – the establishment of such links was ‘neither appropriate nor useful’.27 In spite of this stonewalling, Allardt’s own estimate of the tactical situation after the first meetings was surprisingly optimistic: in his view Gromyko had clearly realised the significance the West German-Soviet negotiations would have for a CSCE.28 It is essential to note that the West German-Soviet negotiations were by no means the only – although the most obvious and immediate – target of West German efforts to instrumentalise the CSCE in Moscow. Deutsch- landpolitik objectives were constantly looming in the background. As one of Bahr’s subordinates in the Chancellery argued in early December, the Soviet Union was in any case needed to persuade the GDR to the negotiating table – and for that purpose the inclusion of the CSCE in the offer could be helpful.29 In fact, the US embassy in Bonn, in a set of insightful telegrams at the end of December 1969 and in early January 1970, seems to have captured the essence of the situation. The FRG had indeed made the inner-German rapprochement ‘almost a precondition’ for its participation in the CSCE.30 According to the interpretation of the US embassy,

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the Brandt Government considered the security conference to be a useful lever which might lure the Soviet Union to put pressure on the GDR to enter into inner-German negotiations.31 In this context, it is particularly interesting that although the instructions to Allardt were formally sent out from the Foreign Ministry, all the sections containing elements of the link to the CSCE were – without exception – direct results of interventions from the Chancellery.32 In particular, the more complex attempt to use the CSCE card to persuade Moscow to put pressure on East Berlin was originally a brainchild of Brandt’s entou- rage. At the request of the Head of the Chancellery, Horst Ehmke, one of the key sentences of the first set of instructions to Allardt read: ‘The clarification of the inner-German relationship would create the basis for a successful process of a European Security Conference.’33 Instead of the Auswärtiges Amt, the Chancellery was in charge. And in addition to Mos- cow, the other addressee of the CSCE linkage policy was East Berlin. Although the Allardt–Gromyko talks ended in December after only three meetings without any concrete results to speak of, the belief in the potential impact of the CSCE leverage remained firm in the Chancellery. In yet another secret meeting with Macovescu, Egon Bahr told his Ro- manian interlocutor that his goverment saw the security conference as a ‘fundamental lever in the discussion with Moscow’.34 It did not take long before Bahr himself had the opportunity to test this lever in practice. After pulling the strings behind the scenes already during Allardt’s discussions, the Chancellery completely took over the responsibility for the West German-Soviet discussions in January 1970, when Bahr was appointed to continue the ‘exchange of opinions’ with Gromyko. Before his departure for Moscow, Bahr presented an ambitious – and, as it turned out, realistic – timetable to Brandt. In Bahr’s opinion, the bilateral renunciation of force had to be completed, or at least its completion had to appear certain, before the early summer of 1970. According to Bahr, the time pressure calling for such rapid progress in the West German-Soviet negotiations was in part due to the CSCE process:

a) There will be no ESC without the Federal Republic. This is our lever. b) This lever serves the bilateral renunciation of force. c) This lever becomes the weaker the closer an ESC gets without us having the bilateral renunciation of force.35

In his idiosyncratic fashion, Bahr thus claimed to have identified an ex- ceptional tactical momentum – yet in the same breath argued that the momentum was on the wane. If the FRG wanted to make use of the CSCE in Moscow, it had to act quickly. The first round of the Bahr–Gromyko talks was opened in Moscow in late January 1970. At the end of their first meeting, Gromyko took the ini-

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tiative and briefly returned to the link between the CSCE and the bilateral talks: ‘We do not want any horse-trading. It would not be good if you were to make your participation in the ESC conditional on the successful conclusion of the current talks.’ Bahr merely replied that his party was not interested in horse-trading either.36 But the topic was covered more extensively in their following meeting. After another attack by Gromyko on ‘artificial connections’, Bahr defended the West German position, arguing that it was neither about horse-trading nor about setting preconditions. Instead, Bahr stressed, the West German-Soviet negotiations were an important part of improving security and détente in Europe. If the talks in Moscow were successful, the FRG would have a strong argument to convince the more sceptical Western powers of the possibilities of a security conference. But on the other hand, Bahr went on: ‘If we failed, the Three Powers would say: “Do you have bats in the belfry? You don’t get the one thing you want the most and now you are rushing there [into the conference]?”’37 Apparently this approach, appealing to potential German influence on the CSCE discussions within the West, struck the right chord in Moscow. Gromyko immediately took it up, pointing out to Bahr that if the FRG made use of its influence on the Three Powers in the CSCE context, the Soviet Union would naturally see that in a positive light. After the meeting, Bahr reported that Gromyko had appeared to understand the West German position completely.38 This optimistic evaluation of the potential leverage was also shared in the upper echelons of the Auswärtiges Amt.39 Moreover, the NATO Ambassador Wilhelm Grewe even called for a stron- ger West German initiative in the conference preparations of the Alliance, since ‘the influence that we are able to have on the development towards an ECS in the Western camp is significant for our negotiating chances in Moscow’.40 In other words, Grewe, an outspoken CSCE sceptic,41 suggested a demonstrative increase in German CSCE activity in the NATO framework in order to further increase the momentum in the Bahr–Gro- myko talks. As the talks in Moscow resumed on 3 March 1970 after a two-week pause, Gromyko repeated Soviet suspicions of West German intentions to link the bilateral negotiations with the CSCE. Bahr reassured the So- viet Foreign Minister that the position of the Federal Government in this respect remained unchanged.42 Only a few days later, Gromyko tabled a Soviet non-paper, in effect already containing the main elements of what would become the final Moscow Treaty and the so-called declarations of intent that supplemented it. In point number 10 of the Soviet document, the Soviet Union and the FRG pledged to ‘undertake the efforts needed to prepare and convene the all-European conference on questions of consolidating security in Europe’.43 In their meeting on 10 March, Bahr told Gro-

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myko that he had been somewhat surprised to see the CSCE paragraph included in the non-paper but admitted that the question had indeed been touched upon in the negotiations. With certain reformulations, Bahr said, the West German side was prepared to agree to this part of the Soviet proposal. In Bahr’s counter-suggestion, the problematic ‘all-European’ at- tribute (potentially implying the exclusion of the North American Allies) was dropped, the level of commitment slightly reduced and the element of cooperation introduced.44 Already, on the following day, the delega- tions were able to agree on a compromise between the Soviet and West German versions of the non-paper. This working paper also included the declaration of intent regarding the CSCE, now in the form: ‘The FRG and the USSR welcome the plan for a conference on questions of consolidating security and cooperation in Europe and will do everything in their power for the preparation and successful implementation of this plan.’45 On 21 March, Bahr and Gromyko gave their final blessing to this formulation.46 The compromise about the CSCE paragraph was probably the easiest one to arrive at among the points in the working paper. And at first sight, compared with the historical proportions of the main clauses of the West German-Soviet renunciation-of-force agreement which was slowly beginning to take shape, the declaration of intent to support a European security conference might appear of minor importance. In fact it was far from insignificant. When Bahr appeared before the Bundestag Foreign Policy Committee in March to report on the latest state of the talks in Moscow, he referred to several official and unofficial discussions with Gromyko about the CSCE.47 The security conference was part and parcel of the Moscow talks, although Brandt for some reason was on many occasions at pains to belittle the influence of the CSCE in the Moscow negotiations.48 As a matter of fact, it seems that the Soviet Union was at least as keen as the Germans to establish a link between the CSCE and the bilateral talks. After all, it was a Soviet initiative to include the CSCE statement as one of the declarations of intent. A fascinating memorandum of the State Department from April 1970, based on US intelligence reports, claims that although Gromyko had consistently rejected the efforts by first Allardt and then Bahr to link the bilateral renunciation of force with West Ger- man support for a security conference, ‘Bahr and Brandt have stated in private that it was the Soviets who had been suggesting that Bonn’s support for the CES would facilitate progress toward a renunciation of force agreement.’ According to these clandestine US sources, Bahr’s analysis of the situation already in late February was that the Soviets wanted Bonn to ‘make it clear to its own allies that it would unconditionally support the calling of a CES’ before a renunciation-of-force agreement could be discussed seriously.49 Later in the summer, in defence of the CSCE com-

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mitment, Auswärtiges Amt officials told their British colleagues that the Germans had ‘really had no option but to take a position in Moscow on what was a scheme of particular interest to the Soviet Government’.50 In any case, the ‘linkage’ policy was beginning to pay dividends. Al- though it is impossible to pin down direct causality from the archival re- cord, it is certainly plausible to think that the agreement reached on the CSCE formulation served as a useful additional lubricant to the progress of the negotiations in Moscow. Moreover, it may also have had the intended triangular impact, via Moscow to East Berlin. Coinciding with the advances made in Moscow in March, there was a parallel development on the inner-German front. On 19 March, at the end of the second round of the Bahr–Gromyko talks, Chancellor Brandt met Willi Stoph in Erfurt. After difficult preparations, a direct contact between the two Ger- man states was finally established. As Mary Sarotte has pointed out, the breakthrough in the preparation of the Erfurt meeting was achieved after a Soviet intervention on 11 March, with immediate effect on the behaviour of the GDR.51 This, as we have seen, was the day when the compromise working paper in Moscow had been agreed on. When Bahr and Gromyko met again on 12 May for the third and final round of their talks, the common undertaking of the FRG and Soviet Union to work towards the CSCE was no longer a contested issue.52 In Bonn, however, the legal department of the Auswärtiges Amt gave a harsh verdict on the working paper under review in Moscow: virtually all the guide- lines were in the Soviet interest alone and it was impossible to achieve a balanced treaty on their basis. The CSCE paragraph was no exception. According to the legal experts, this declaration would mark a departure from the common CSCE consultations within NATO, committing the FRG to go it alone and support the conference in line with Soviet interests.53 Nevertheless, making full use of his independent negotiating position in Moscow, Bahr kept his head. The CSCE formulation agreed in March remained unchanged as the final declaration of intent in the end product of the Bahr–Gromyko talks, the document later known as the ‘Bahr Paper’.54 And again, the end of a Bahr–Gromyko round in Moscow coincided with an inner-German summit. On 21 May Brandt and Stoph had their second meeting within two months, this time in Kassel. In contrast to Erfurt, however, there is no indication of a direct link between progress in Moscow and the timing of the Kassel meeting. But if the West German commitment to the CSCE in Moscow was indeed bearing fruit in facilitating the process towards a West German- Soviet treaty, the Soviets were also quick to demand that the Federal Re- public lived up to its word. The ink on the Bahr Paper was hardly dry when Ambassador Tsarapkin met Foreign Minister Scheel in Bonn to call

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for further German efforts to promote the CSCE at the upcoming NATO Foreign Ministers’ meeting in Rome.55 In July, the Soviet Ambassador suggested to Chancellor Brandt that bilateral West German-Soviet consultations about the CSCE should be opened.56 Brandt and Scheel were able to evade these approaches, but the Soviets clearly interpreted the CSCE formulations of the Bahr Paper as a genuine commitment. The Bahr Paper as a whole laid the ground for the actual negotiations for the Moscow Treaty between Scheel and Gromyko in July and August, but its final declaration of intent threatened to become a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it does appear that Bahr was successful in using the CSCE lever in his discussions in Moscow more or less as planned. But on the other hand, whatever had been gained by Bahr in return for promises of support for the CSCE, that leverage was spent at the moment the commitment was locked into the Bahr Paper. From May 1970 onwards, that particular German-Soviet connection could only work the other way. Moreover, any hopes there may have been for using the security conference as a direct bargaining chip in the contacts with the GDR were dealt a severe blow precisely by the CSCE commitment made in Moscow. When the Scheel–Gromyko negotiations were concluded on 7 August with the initialling of the Moscow Treaty, the Foreign Ministers also exchanged initialled copies of the six final declarations of intent of the Bahr Paper. Al- though these commitments were not officially part of the Moscow Treaty, they naturally did not go unnoticed in East Berlin, either. In a memorandum of the GDR Foreign Ministry, the commitment of the Federal Repub- lic to the CSCE project was greeted as a triumph. ‘This binding promise of the FRG can be used in the future to rebut its objections to and preconditions for a security conference.’57 With important repercussions for the later CSCE discussions about in- violability of frontiers, the Germans also managed to get the Soviet Union to register the receipt of a separate ‘letter on German unity’ on the occasion of the signing of the Moscow Treaty. In this letter, the Federal Gov- ernment stated that the treaty did not contradict the aim of the Federal Republic to create ‘a state of peace in Europe in which the German people can regain its unity in free self-determination’.58 While the Federal Government, in its official statement regarding the Moscow Treaty, tried to give an assurance that ‘this declaration of intent does not interfere with the prerequisites the Federal Government consid- ers indispensable for such a conference’59, the implications that commitment had for any potential leverage on the GDR must have been obvious in Bonn as well. Already during the spring, the appropriate location for applying the CSCE linkage had been clearly perceived to be in Moscow. This was not only witnessed by the constant presence of the CSCE in the

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Bahr–Gromyko talks, but also by the complete absence of the conference from the agenda of the Brandt–Stoph discussions. In his conversations with the East Germans, Brandt made no attempt, either in Erfurt or in Kassel, to use the security conference directly as a bargaining tool. The Moscow Treaty and the CSCE commitment attached to it emphasised further that the inner-German element of the CSCE linkage strategy had to be thought of in triangular terms: going through Moscow in order to have an impact on East Berlin. Accordingly, in conjunction with the signing of the Moscow Treaty on 12 August, Brandt suggested to Kosygin that Soviet support in bringing about genuine inner-German negotiations would also help the preparations of a security conference – but did not present them as an absolute precondition.60 With the Moscow Treaty signed, although still far from being ratified and entering into force, in less than a year after the inauguration of the Brandt–Scheel Government, Ostpolitik had got off to a flying start. Indeed, for many observers – foreign and domestic alike – the pace was too quick, resulting in unnecessary concessions by the West German negotiators in Moscow. Ambassador Allardt later bitterly criticised Bahr and Brandt for their premature use of the CSCE leverage: ‘Our agreement [to the conference] was of a very special value to the Kremlin. It was a trump card which would have deserved an adequate reward’.61 Allardt’s criticism is difficult to subscribe to completely, since the Moscow Treaty itself ought to have been more than enough of a reward. Given the historic weight of the German-Soviet agreement, if the commitment to the security conference helped in part to bring about the treaty, it was certainly a price Bonn could afford to pay. Yet there is also a kernel of truth in Allardt’s attack. Once the West German commitment to the CSCE was laid on the table in Moscow, its value as a lever elsewhere was dramatically diminished.

Rethinking the Linkage Strategy

In the new situation after the Moscow Treaty, the West Germans basically had two alternative ways to continue using the CSCE leverage. On the one hand, the FRG could continue its attempts to have Moscow persuade East Berlin to come to the inner-German negotiating table, pointing out the advantageous impact that this would have on the CSCE. As shown above, there had been a consistent tendency in Bonn to see the CSCE lever on the GDR as most efficient when applied through Moscow. On the other hand, a perhaps more promising alternative was to try to multilateralise the linkage approach in the West, by focusing increasingly on the Berlin

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talks instead of bilateral negotiations as further preconditions for a security conference. As the contents of the Bahr Paper were leaked to West German news- papers in June 1970, the final declaration of intent of the Bahr–Gromyko agreement also came into the public domain. This naturally led to misgiv- ings at home as well as abroad. Was the Federal Republic now acting as the advocate of Moscow in the CSCE discussions of the West? In an effort to dispel these suspicions, Egon Bahr appeared before the NATO Council, explaining the results of his negotiations with Gromyko and emphasising to the Allies that no promises regarding the security conference had been made in Moscow that went beyond agreements made in the NATO framework, and that the CSCE policies of the Federal Republic in NATO were in no way prejudiced by the Bahr Paper.62 In Bonn, the Auswärtiges Amt made similar explanations, arguing that there was no absolute yardstick for the undertaking to do ‘everything in their power’ in favour of a CSCE. In particular, this commitment could not override the democratic principles of NATO decision-making – the FRG still had to respect majority decisions in the Alliance.63 Indeed, no matter how thoroughly planned, any FRG attempts to use the CSCE as a tool for its Ostpolitik could succeed only if they were backed by constant multilateral support from the NATO allies. From the spring of 1970, this support was no longer unanimous and unconditional. The changing situation within the Alliance was one factor contributing to West German reconsideration of the linkage strategy. As we have seen above, in December 1969, NATO Foreign Ministers had agreed that tangible progress in the Berlin question and in the inner- German relationship had to be made before the opening of any multilateral discussions.64 Subsequently, it was increasingly the Berlin negotiations that were moving to the centre of attention in NATO. The French especially, eager to maintain their particular position as one of the Big Four, appeared to be ‘obsessed’ with Berlin. They were concerned that a de facto recognition of the GDR resulting from its participation in a CSCE would lead to significant deterioration of the Berlin situation, if that had not been regulated beforehand.65 The quadripartite talks about the situation in the divided city were started on 26 March 1970, with the first meeting of the three Western Ambassadors to Bonn and the Soviet Ambassador to East Berlin. But progress in these four-power Berlin negotiations during the spring of 1970 was minimal. Given the widespread consensus in the Al- liance on the importance of the Berlin precondition, this also made rapid movements towards a CSCE unthinkable for the time being. But in the spring of 1970 there were signs of wavering in the NATO members’ willingness to support the FRG when it came to the bilateral

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Ostpolitik negotiations – and in particular the inner-German talks – as preconditions for a CSCE. The French, especially, with a growing interest of their own in the conference, began to voice their suspicions.66 Dur- ing his visit to Moscow in January, Hervé Alphand, the top official of the French Foreign Ministry, had argued that the FRG should not be allowed to become the judge of the fate of the conference.67 In April, another high- ranking official at the Quai d’Orsay delivered a similar message in Paris to the Finnish Ambassador Ralph Enckell, who was sounding out CSCE positions of potential participants.68 The French also turned directly to the Germans, asking whether the FRG still continued to hold to the view of demanding progress in inner-German negotiations before a security conference.69 In response, the embassy in Paris was instructed to reconfirm the known West German position. The Federal Republic could agree to a CSCE only after concrete steps had been taken in the inner-German discussions. Additionally, the FRG continued to see its bilateral discussions with Moscow and Warsaw as well as the Berlin talks of the Four Powers as test cases of Soviet preparedness for genuine détente.70 However, it was becoming clear that there was a significant internal shortcoming in the linkage strategy of the FRG. The West Germans them- selves appeared unable to define precisely what constituted the degree of progress in the inner-German and Berlin talks required to justify West German agreement to enter a multilateral security conference. An FRG embassy official in London conceded as much in February 1970, saying that it was impossible to say how far such progress would have to go: ‘The main thing was that it should have gone sufficiently far to make it certain that there would be no confrontation between the Germans at a conference.’71 In internal background papers the problem was recognised with greater clarity. ‘The Federal Government has not been able to deter- mine what amount of inner-German development is considered sufficient for a CES.’ For the time being, the ambiguous West German line was to refuse to be drawn into a CSCE before the ‘necessary degree of maturity’ in the bilateral negotiations and the Berlin talks had been achieved.72 This hesitation was particularly awkward in a situation where most of the Al- lies still agreed that due to the ongoing SALT and Ostpolitik negotiations, it was the United States and the FRG that held the keys to determining whether sufficient progress had been made to justify multilateral talks.73 In the British view of the Western CSCE preparations ‘most of the cards were in Federal German hands’.74 In the short term, the Germans were able to play their hand well. Preparing the communiqué for the spring 1970 ministerial meeting, the NATO allies agreed that the opening of actual multilateral negotiations still continued to be conditional on the progress in the talks that were al-

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ready under way. However, the UK and Belgium, actively supported by the Scandinavians, argued that the ministers should balance this by expressing NATO’s preparedness already to enter ‘multilateral exploratory talks’ about a security conference – partly in order to keep public opinion at home satisfied.75 The FRG led the opposing camp, condemning this idea of an ambassadorial ‘tea party’ in Helsinki to sound out the prospects of a conference, dating back to a Belgian proposal from March 1970. In the West German view, such a ‘tea party’ would have the same collateral effects as a conference proper. Although this conflict was not resolved in time for the NATO Foreign Ministers’ meeting in Rome in May, the Ger- mans were able to count on the support of the US in preventing the Anglo- Belgian proposal from being accepted.76 According to the US NATO Ambassador, in the Rome meeting the FRG ‘did its best to avoid taking a position on anything’, probably in order to maintain maximum flexibility in the sensitive phase of Ostpolitik.77 The French did most of the legwork in finding a compromise position, and in the end, the option for exploratory talks was not mentioned. Moreover, the relevant paragraph in the Rome communiqué referred, for the first time, explicitly to progress in the inner-German and Berlin talks as a prerequisite for the conference preparations:

In so far as progress is recorded […] in the on-going talks – in particular on Germany and Berlin – the Allied Governments state that they would be ready to enter into multilateral contacts with all interested governments. One of the main purposes of such contacts would be to explore when it will be possible to convene a conference or a series of conferences on European security and co-operation.78

In short, the Germans had reason to be content with the outcome of the Rome meeting.79 Not only was the linkage between the inner-German talks and the CSCE maintained – it was also articulated in clearer terms than before. Nevertheless, the budding discontent within NATO during the spring of 1970 had made its presence felt: it was obvious that the Allies would not be prepared to grant the FRG a de facto veto on the CSCE preparations indefinitely, if this veto was based on bilateral German negotiations alone. In June the Auswärtiges Amt estimated that it might be possible to hold this question open for a further six months, until the following NATO ministerial meeting in December 1970, but hardly any longer than that.80 This turned out to be a prophetic statement.

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Berlin Surpasses Other Preconditions

During the summer of 1970, the West Germans’ own position on linkage of the Berlin talks with the CSCE was already on the move, yet still far from a firmly established new line. In their discussions with Allied colleagues, Auswärtiges Amt officials were prepared to soften the preconditions required for a CSCE, conceding that they did not expect all of the Eastern treaties to be ‘signed, sealed and delivered’ before there could be progress towards a security conference. Simultaneously, however, the same officials continued to refer to the leverage the Soviet interest in the security conference gave to the West and to argue that the Alliance ought to see progress in the bilateral negotiations of the Federal Republic as a ‘touchstone’ for deciding when to multilateralise contacts.81 Egon Bahr took this dialectical approach even further, saying in the same breath that on the one hand, the bilateral negotiations were not a precondition for a CSCE but that on the other hand, if they failed, the idea of a conference would be dead.82 Brandt, for his part, was more cautious, pointing to the inadvisability of creating hard and binding links between different areas of foreign policy.83 In fact, as the positions began to take shape, there was a fascinating divergence of views between the views of the Chancellery and the Foreign Ministry during the autumn of 1970. Brandt’s Chancellery had reason to believe that there could be movement in Deutschlandpolitik even without the direct use of the CSCE leverage. On 29 October, an East German delegation – prompted by the Soviet Union – arrived in Bonn to meet Brandt, suggesting the reopening of talks between the FRG and the GDR.84 Brandt welcomed the idea, and a month later in East Berlin, Bahr and his GDR colleague Michael Kohl began their negotiations on transit questions between the two German states.85 The pace of these negotiations was admittedly glacial in the beginning, but the six-month ‘pause for reflection’ in inner-German relations was nonetheless overcome. This also had important repercussions for the CSCE policy of the FRG. In an interesting shift, just when the Auswärtiges Amt leadership had adopted the brainchild of Brandt and Bahr, the very creators of the linkage strategy were already beginning to depart from it. For the Chancellery, the CSCE linkage had already served its major purpose in the West German- Soviet negotiations, and there was no longer much to be hoped for from it in the strictly bilateral inner-German context. The divergence between the Chancellery and the Auswärtiges Amt in late 1970 was further consolidated by the internal division of labour. During the first year of the Brandt Gov- ernment, the Chancellery had effectively taken charge of all the bilateral issues considered to be the hard core of West German foreign policy –

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the Moscow negotiations being a case in point.86 This had left the Foreign Ministry sidelined, with responsibility for less important issues, such as the emerging CSCE process. After a fairly weak first year in office, Foreign Minister Scheel, supported by the new State Secretary of the Auswärtiges Amt, Paul Frank, was now willing to make his presence felt.87 More or less excluded from the Chancellery-dominated Ostpolitik and Deutschlandpoli- tik, Scheel and his subordinates attempted to make the CSCE a policy area of their own, in an effort to prove their independence. To complicate matters further, the Auswärtiges Amt was not speaking with one voice. Over the summer, Scheel had tended to emphasise the Ber- lin negotiations, at the expense of the inner-German talks, to the Soviets as the major test that needed to be passed before the CSCE.88 This corre- sponded with the ideas of the less rigid elements in the Foreign Ministry. For example Berndt von Staden and Günther van Well, two high-ranking officials in the political department, were both of the view that although agreement on some kind of treaty with the GDR before a CSCE was de- sirable, it was better to speak merely about a ‘clarification’ of the inner- German relationship or a modus vivendi, in order to avoid the ‘impression of preconditions’ and damaging effects onOstpolitik resulting from it.89 In this line of reasoning, it was considered tactically advantageous to multilateralise the ‘linkage’ policy and to share the responsibility for de- laying the CSCE by focusing on progress in the Berlin talks as the main prerequisite, rather than to appear as the sole demandeur blocking the road to the conference.90 This emphasis on Berlin instead of inner-German talks was also reflected in Scheel’s discussions in October 1970 with various interlocutors, whether Western, Eastern or neutral.91 Somewhat curiously, the Berlin precondition actually seemed to go down better in Moscow than in Brussels. Whereas the Soviet Union appeared, albeit grudgingly, to be prepared to accept the need for a Berlin agreement before a CSCE, a number of smaller NATO members increasingly voiced their discomfort about it. Their main concern was that the secretive handling of the Berlin negotiations by the Bonn Group powers would also give them a monopoly on Western decision-making about the fate of the security conference.92 But in the autumn of 1970 there was a clear backlash from the hardliners in the Auswärtiges Amt, attempting to rescue and restore the link between inner-German talks and the CSCE.93 They considered it essential to hold firmly to the formulations of the Rome communiqué: no form of a multilateralisation of the CSCE preparations should be considered until substantial progress in the bilateral negotiations of the FRG and in the Berlin question had been recorded.94 In September 1970 the West German representative in the NATO Council declared that progress in the inner- German negotiations continued to be the major yardstick for their deci-

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sion whether to take part in a CSCE.95 Against the backdrop of the West German CSCE commitment made in Moscow, this position was certainly ‘stiffer than may have been expected’, as the US Ambassador to Bonn, Kenneth Rush, commented. Rush’s conclusion, that the unexpected firm- ness was in part a German reaction to Western suspicions raised by the very same declaration of intent in the Bahr Paper, was probably not very far off the mark.96 In the latter half of the autumn, the hardliners seemed to be getting the upper hand in the Auswärtiges Amt. In a meeting with Gromyko on 30 October, Scheel surprised his Soviet colleague by returning progress in inner-German negotiations and other bilateral talks – on an equal footing with the Berlin negotiations – to the list of developments that ought to pre- cede the security conference. Indeed, instead of just referring to ‘progress’, Scheel went further and suggested that practical preparations for a security conference could commence when ‘circumstances for the accession of both German states to the United Nations had been created’. Gromyko immediately rebutted this suggestion as a West German attempt to create new preconditions for the conference.97 It was precisely in this element that the views of the Chancellery and the Auswärtiges Amt were going in separate directions. In his comments to a Foreign Ministry working paper on the CSCE and Deutschlandpolitik, Egon Bahr in early November 1970 underscored that from a tactical point of view it was essential now to avoid the impression of posing new preconditions.98 But at least in the short term the dominant Auswärtiges Amt view – prepared to risk that impression – prevailed. The working paper, with only minor modifications, was presented to the Bonn Group on 5 No- vember, emphasising that in spite of the recent focus on the Berlin talks, progress was still also needed in the inner-German talks before a security conference. Moreover, this Auswärtiges Amt study for the first time made a clear distinction between multilateral conference preparations and the conference proper. Multilateral CSCE preparations had to be preceded by the ‘beginning of genuine negotiations between the two German governments’. Before the actual conference, then again, these inner-German negotiations had to be underway and an agreement reached on the ‘essential features of an inner-German settlement’.99 Two weeks after the Bonn Group meeting, this West German position paper was also delivered to the other NATO allies.100 The US saw this as a major shift in the West German approach: the FRG now wanted to see progress in the inner-German modus vivendi as well, instead of only in the Berlin talks, before a CSCE.101 Although the West Ger- man position was considered ‘entirely reasonable’ and received full US support, George Vest from the US NATO mission admitted that ‘this may,

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as an apparently new and additional “precondition”, be hard to sell to some members of the Alliance. […] To switch emphasis to inner-German talks – or at least to argue that this was what was always intended – may be regarded as rewriting history’. Therefore Vest recommended that the FRG, to improve its chances of success, ought to seek support from the Bonn Group before the upcoming meeting of NATO Foreign Ministers.102 This was precisely what the Auswärtiges Amt intended. At a quadripartite meeting in mid-November 1970 the political directors of all the Three Powers agreed with the West Germans on the need to find a common position on the progress in the German and Berlin questions needed to justify a CSCE. The main argument for finding a consensus in the Bonn Group was the ability to speak with one voice to the remaining NATO allies, although their sensitivities about being left out of the CSCE preparations were well known.103 Using the Bonn Group in the CSCE context was a powerful tool. Hans Otto Bräutigam, who was at that time a desk officer in the Deutschlandpolitik unit of the Auswärtiges Amt, has later stressed the extraordinary influence of the Bonn Group during the intensive cooperation in the Berlin negotiations. If the Bonn Group agreed on something on the working level, it was very difficult for any of the four governments involved to reverse that decision later on.104 When it came to actually finding substantive support for the West Ger- man view in the Bonn Group, two thirds of the task were relatively easy. The United States and Britain had little reason to oppose West German insistence on a ‘clarification’ of the inner-German relationship before any multilateral conference preparations. The US had never been enthusiastic about the CSCE, but the reservations the UK had on the conference resulted from the change of government in June 1970. Under the leadership of the new Conservative Prime Minister Edward Heath, the Brit- ish Government focused its European policies on accession to the EC and assumed a distinctly more passive role in the CSCE discussion.105 This was spelled out clearly by Foreign Secretary Douglas-Home in December 1970: ‘It is chiefly the Federal German Government who, in their wish to see progress in the Berlin negotiations and in the inner German talks, are pressing their allies to go slow on the question of the Conference. … When the Federal German Government are ready for a Conference on European Security, we shall not oppose it.’106 Whereas this change in Alliance dynamics was favourable for West German efforts to uphold the link between the inner-German negotiations and a CSCE, it was neutralised by a simultaneous change in the opposite direction, that in Paris. In the autumn of 1970, convincing the French of the inner-German precondition for a security conference turned out

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to be next to impossible. France was a very recent convert to the CSCE cause. The one-week visit of President Pompidou to Moscow in October 1970 had marked the first occasion of a positive French statement about the proposed CSCE.107 But following that visit, the transformation was rapid. In a true volte-face, after previously being among the most sceptical Western voices, the French officials now spoke actively in favour of the conference project. At the same time, a successful conclusion of the Ber- lin Agreement became the only precondition for a CSCE the French were willing to discuss. At first, the change in the French position did not diminish the confidence with which the Auswärtiges Amt looked at the forthcoming West- ern consultations. In preparation for the back-to-back Foreign Ministers’ meetings of NATO and the European Political Cooperation (EPC) due in early December 1970, the West German officials were certain that they could convince their allies of the need to achieve substantial progress in the inner-German talks, in addition to the Berlin negotiations, before multilateralisation of the CSCE preparations would be justified.108 The US Ambassador in Bonn reported that despite being acutely aware of the criticism such a blocking position might incur, the FRG was prepared to ‘hold out for some progress on inner-German talks, even if this would mean … exercising a “veto” over the conference’.109 Yet the French were not to be persuaded. In the EPC negotiations of the Ten on 2 December in Brussels, Scheel argued that certain prerequisites for the improvement of the political East–West climate were needed before a conference, and those included not only progress in Berlin, but also in the inner-German relationship. If not a conclusion of an inner-German treaty, then at least a ‘conclusive stage’ in those negotiations had to be achieved prior to multilateral preparations of a security conference.110 But reflecting the new French policy on the CSCE, Schumann now vehemently opposed this. In complete contradiction to his position a year earlier, the French Foreign Minister argued that progress in the Berlin negotiations should be the only Western precondition for a CSCE. Schumann added that a result in the Berlin talks would necessarily lead to an improvement of the inner- German relationship, making a separate precondition unnecessary.111 Ac- cordingly, in the final analysis of the EPC meeting, the Auswärtiges Amt was able to point to an agreement of the Ten only on the necessity of a Berlin agreement before a CSCE.112 Due to French opposition, the same could not be said about the inner-German precondition. The same drama was replayed in the NATO ministerial meeting the following day, also in Brussels. The potential leverage on the Soviets, resulting from the linkage of the Berlin negotiations and the CSCE, enjoyed

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widespread support in the Alliance.113 In fact, the number of members calling for immediate multilateralisation of CSCE preparations had fallen since the previous ministerial meeting in Rome. Apart from the Scandina- vian countries cautiously in favour of swift multilateralisation, the others now all agreed that the progress achieved in the form of the West German- Soviet and West German-Polish treaties, welcome as it was, did not yet fulfil the conditions set in the Rome communiqué in May, since a Berlin agreement was still missing.114 But when the discussion moved to other possible preconditions for a CSCE, Schumann showed no signs of retreating from the rigid position of his government: it was Berlin and nothing but Berlin. Although France was left alone in opposing the further inclusion of ‘progress in inner-Ger- man negotiations’ as a prerequisite for a conference, not even US and Brit- ish support for the West Germans was of any avail.115 Faced with French intransigence, Scheel had to budge. The West Germans had no option but to settle for a lukewarm compromise formulation on vaguely defined ‘on- going talks’, inserted into the final communiqué on their behalf by the Bel- gians.116 Consequently, the NATO communiqué signalled a clear priority given to the Berlin talks. The Berlin precondition was spelled out in stron- ger terms than before (‘satisfactory conclusion’ rather than ‘progress’), but in contrast to the Rome communiqué six months before, the one agreed on in Brussels in December 1970 no longer explicitly mentioned the inner- German talks. Instead, the ministers

affirmed the readiness of their governments, as soon as the talks on Berlin have reached a satisfactory conclusion and in so far as the other on-going talks are proceeding favourably, to enter into multilateral contacts with all interested governments to explore when it would be possible to convene a conference, or a series of conferences, on security and co-operation in Europe.117

Afterwards, when briefing the Finns about the Brussels meeting, Political Director Berndt von Staden explained that the communiqué negotiations had been straightforward and unproblematic, and that there had not been any major differences in opinion between the Allies.118 The Swedish embassy in Bonn, reporting from a similar briefing, noted that the Auswär- tiges Amt viewed the French lead in Brussels and the subsequent focus of the Alliance on the Berlin precondition ‘not without satisfaction’.119 Moreover, in a memorandum written by the leading Auswärtiges Amt official directly responsible for CSCE affairs, Götz von Groll,120 the ‘on-going talks’ clause was interpreted as including the need to reach a ‘conclusive stage’ in the negotiations between the FRG and the GDR before multilateral preparations for a CSCE.121

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But no upbeat explanations given in retrospect could change the fact that the Brussels meeting marked a clear defeat for the Federal Republic – or, to be precise, for the hardliners in the Auswärtiges Amt – within NATO. As Bahr had predicted already in September 1969, bargaining with the CSCE in order to achieve an inner-German arrangement was sustainable only for as long as the support of the Three Powers was secured.122 With France no longer behind the FRG in this, no measure of support by the other two – fairly passive in the case of Britain, somewhat more active in that of the US – was sufficient to persuade the Alliance to adopt the West German line. Having learned this lesson the hard way, the Auswär- tiges Amt was quick to come back in line with the Chancellery. Within weeks after the December 1970 NATO ministerial meeting, West German demands for an inner-German agreement as a formal precondition for the CSCE preparations had disappeared completely from the diplomatic stage. However, in late 1970 it was already impossible to think about the CSCE merely in terms of linkage. Far from being only a theoretical War- saw Pact propaganda initiative, the agenda of a future security conference had already in 1969 become a subject of serious European discussion. The Federal Republic was no exception.

Discovering the Potential of the CSCE

The focus of West German foreign policy in the first year of the Brandt Government was beyond doubt on bilateral Ostpolitik. Accordingly, as witnessed above, the approach to the CSCE in 1969–70 was also dominated by attempts to utilise the conference project for that purpose. But in addition to being seen as a useful tool in pursuing the most immediate goals of the Eastern treaty framework, the CSCE in and of itself was increasingly given serious thought in Bonn. The latter half of this chapter will trace this development, starting again from October 1969. In 1969–70, the general momentum for the conference was clearly growing, as recurrent Warsaw Pact statements were supported by interventions from the neutral and non-aligned countries. The most notable move from outside the alliances came again from the Finns, who in February 1970 appointed Ralph Enckell as a roving ambassador to sound out views on the CSCE held in European and North American capitals.123 In the broader policy considerations made in Bonn at the time, the possible CSCE was already seen as an integral part of West German foreign policy planning for the medium to long term, potentially also serving fundamental West German interests in the conference substance per se, not merely by its instrumental use.

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Already at this early stage of the discussions about a possible security conference, one defining characteristic of the CSCE policy of the Federal Republic was beginning to show: the policy-makers in Bonn were not expecting quick and immediate gains from it. The notion of the conference as a process (Prozesscharakter), something the longest-serving Foreign Minister in the history of the FRG, Hans-Dietrich Genscher, emphasises as the quintessential quality of the CSCE, was present in West German thinking from the outset.124 Rather than any sudden results, the West Ger- mans hoped to gain something from the gradual yet dynamic development the CSCE might bring about. As the Auswärtiges Amt CSCE working group, which had been set up under Foreign Minister Brandt in June 1969, presented its final report four months later, this process approach was already visible. The CSCE would not be a one-time event leading immediately to political results, the report stated, but part of a long-term process, probably consisting of a number of conferences. Along the lines drafted by Bahr during his time in the Auswärtiges Amt, the working group envisaged a CSCE contributing to a European security system, as a step towards a lasting European peace order.125 Having moved to the Chancellery, Bahr continued to present his foreign policy concept as one entity, interweaving the bilateral treaties currently pursued with possible multilateral arrangements, leading to détente and peace in Europe.126 In the Chancellery, Brandt’s Parliamentary State Sec- retary Katharina Focke took on the CSCE even more enthusiastically. In March 1970, Focke wrote to Brandt, Ehmke and Bahr, calling for a revision of the foreign policy strategy papers Bahr had drafted before the election. In Focke’s view, they were insufficient for the current government and more thorough groundwork was urgently needed. Interestingly, she argued that the CSCE itself should be the main point of reference for this new, cohesive German foreign policy concept, outlining the contours of a European security system and peace order alike. Focke argued that particular German interests in the CSCE context as well as suitable ways to pursue general German interests in the conference needed to be defined as clearly as possible – for it was the CSCE that would ultimately link the Western and Eastern policies of the FRG. Focke, suspicious of the compe- tence in the Auswärtiges Amt planning staff after Bahr’s departure, even suggested convening a small special task force within the government to focus on this exercise.127 In public speeches as well as in internal memoranda the Chancellery continued to elaborate on the importance of the CSCE, in terms of the twin concepts of security system and peace order, but there is no evidence of the task force suggested by Focke ever being convened.128 When it came to the implementation of these larger schemes, at this stage the Chancellery

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was simply too preoccupied and overstretched with the bilateral negotiations to concentrate on the detailed preparations of the CSCE. It was symptomatic of the detachment of the Chancellery from the CSCE at this stage that Brandt, although in principle favouring the conference, on several occasions in 1970 told his interlocutors that the conference probably would not amount to much more than the participants taking turns in reading aloud their prepared speeches.129 This situation left an opening for the Auswärtiges Amt to operate independently at the working level. Although free from the intra-governmental constraints in defining West German CSCE policy, the Auswärtiges Amt identified two major external factors, pulling in opposite directions, potentially having an impact on the position of the Federal Republic. Just like other NATO allies, the West Ger- mans, too, paid attention to Soviet objectives on the one hand, and public opinion at home on the other. The new chief of the Auswärtiges Amt planning staff, Dirk Oncken, expressed this dilemma pointedly in May 1970: ‘If we support the CES, we take the risk of supporting the Soviet status quo policy; if we reject the CES, we take the risk of isolating ourselves in the eyes of the Western public’.130 The need to analyse Soviet motives behind its push for the CSCE had urgently resurfaced at the end of October 1969, as the Foreign Ministers of the Warsaw Pact states in their Prague meeting took the initiative yet again in plans for a conference. In the Czechoslovak capital, the Warsaw Pact Foreign Ministers presented two separate resolutions to be issued by the CSCE: one on the renunciation of force, the other on the expansion of cooperation in trade, economy, science and technology. The Prague declaration, which the Soviets were actively promoting in Western capitals afterwards, also suggested convening the conference in Helsinki already in the first half of 1970.131 The West Germans considered the suggested timing to be intentionally completely unrealistic, attempting to put the West under pressure and to ‘mobilise public opinion in this propaganda- efficient question’.132 The Prague declaration was seen as not only a ‘clever move to split the West’, but also a Soviet effort to undermine German bilateral negotiations – making it possible for the Soviets to ‘put the noose of the European security conference around [the FRG’s] neck’ at every West German attempt to open political discussions.133 But in the Auswärtiges Amt these suspicions were quickly turned into an asset for the West. Since an outright rejection of Eastern proposals could easily lead to the West being blamed for the failure of the conference, it was felt that constructive efforts to prepare an agenda that would meet Western interests should instead be accelerated. In order to return the ball to the Eastern court, Political Director Ruete in November 1969 suggested proposing human contacts and balanced force reductions as additional

This open access library edition is supported by Knowledge Unlatched. Not for resale. 92 | A State of Peace in Europe topics to be covered by the CSCE.134 This approach, countering concerns over the reasons behind Soviet CSCE enthusiasm by focusing more in- tensively on preparation of the agenda of the conference within the West, was quickly adopted as the standard West German line. And after the negotiations on a bilateral West German-Soviet renunciation of force agreement started in December 1969, the attention given in theAuswärtiges Amt to pondering Soviet intentions receded noticeably. This indicates that in Bonn the CSCE was already in 1969 seen not only as a necessary evil, but also as a welcome development in European détente. Further evidence for the argument that the FRG took the CSCE seriously early on is provided by the Federal German approach to the German question and the participation of the GDR in the conference. The constant underscoring of the need to clarify the inner-German relations before the CSCE could be convened was not merely an effort to link the two sets of negotiations together for instrumental purposes – it also reflected genuine concerns in Bonn about the procedure of the future conference. The problems provided by the German question were twofold. On the one hand, it was essential that the participation of the GDR in the conference should not prejudge the international recognition of the East German state. It is interesting here that the participation of the GDR in such a conference was never questioned by the Brandt Government, not even in the autumn of 1969, when inner-German negotiations had not yet started. Instead, the focus was on efforts to rule out unwanted consequences of this participation.135 On the other hand, Bonn was concerned at having issues dealing with Germany as a whole discussed and handled at the conference. It was essential to ensure that the CSCE would not become a conference on the German question.136 A natural forum for regulating these problematic German issues was the Bonn Group. But the fact that the West Germans started to think about concrete measures in this respect as early as November 1969, when the idea of tasking the Bonn Group with drafting a disclaimer clause on GDR participation first came up, speaks volumes about the degree of serious- ness with which the CSCE was regarded.137 In December 1969 the Three Powers accepted the West German proposal for preparing a disclaimer declaration, in effect stating that the participation of the GDR would not mean its recognition under international law by other participants. This declaration was to be issued, if possible, jointly with the Soviet Union at the beginning of the CSCE.138 This was no longer mere contingency planning – this was already a part of concrete preparations for the conference. Coming back to the other source of potential pressure Oncken referred to in May 1970, public opinion, its impact was in fact rather limited. When

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the substantive preparation for the CSCE truly began, the West German decision-makers and Foreign Ministry officials did not feel under any pressure from their own public opinion.139 As the US embassy reported in late December 1969, the Auswärtiges Amt believed there was ‘little genuine popular interest in an ESC in Western Europe, certainly hardly any in the FRG itself’.140 This position was in striking contrast to many of their colleagues within the West, particularly in the UK. In the spring of 1970, Brit- ish officials repeatedly referred to growing public pressure for the West to move towards a pan-European conference. This, particularly coming from the left wing of the Labour Party, was also one of the main reasons behind their initiative for a Standing Commission on East–West relations, an idea later quietly given up, as Wilson was succeeded by Heath.141 The British were not alone in their concern. In the ministerial meeting of NATO in Rome in May 1970, where the Allies agreed on the need to give a clear impulse to the improvement of East–West relations, several Foreign Min- isters pointed to the need to demonstrate to the young generation at home that ‘NATO represented an important element of political progress’.142 In the larger Western context, the West Germans were not oblivious to these concerns either. But with regard to domestic opinion, the West Germans could state baldly: ‘We are not under pressure from public opinion’.143 This was probably a fairly accurate estimate. With all the simultaneous negotiations of bilateral Ostpolitik, the Brandt Government hardly needed to worry about being blamed for lack of movement – if anything, it was accused of the reverse in some quarters. Ostpolitik in general was not opposed by public opinion.144 At the same time, it overshadowed other developments in the public perception. It was not only the government that was at times overstretched by Ostpolitik, the same also applied to the opposition, parliamentary and extra-parliamentary alike. In the Bundestag plenary debates, for example, the CSCE was referred to only occasionally. Interestingly, in one of the rare exceptions, when the CSCE was indeed discussed in the Bundestag in February 1970, several parliamentarians from the opposition CDU urged the government to contribute to the conference by raising ‘security of human dignity’ and freedom of movement on the CSCE agenda, as a means towards a European peace order.145 In all, the genuine interest in a CSCE in Bonn was limited to a small number of government officials. Therefore, West German policy-makers could take on the substantive preparations of the CSCE as a truly multilateral exercise within the West, fairly isolated from the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact countries on the one hand, and from their domestic constituency on the other. For the time being, the main arena for these preparations was the NATO framework.

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Conference on Security or Conference on Cooperation?

Within NATO, the Allied discussions of the CSCE agenda were based on a Senior Political Committee report on the ‘list of issues for possible negotiations with the East’, the first version of which had been circulated in July 1969. This document identified four possible groups of themes: (1) measures to reduce tension and promote confidence; (2) arms limitations and disarmament; (3) measures for economic, technological and cultural cooperation; and (4) Germany and Berlin.146 In an updated report in Octo- ber 1969, the Allies elaborated their views on these groups further, subdi- viding them into categories according to their political attractiveness and ‘negotiability’.147 The West Germans were keen on stressing that the list of issues discussed within NATO was not yet a suggested list of agenda items for a possible CSCE.148 While this was technically correct, given that the SPC reports did not specifically refer to a CSCE but only to ‘East–West negotiations’ in general, there was no denying that these documents already laid a substantial, wide-ranging and relatively advanced founda- tion for what was to become the Western CSCE position, in particular on the security issues. Ranging from the renunciation of force and a ‘code of good conduct’ between states to the advance notification of military manoeuvres, it contained numerous elements that were to become vital Western positions in the forthcoming negotiations. From the autumn of 1969 onwards the ‘list of issues’ dominated the CSCE discussion within the Alliance – this was also visible in the declaration of the NATO Foreign Ministers in December 1969. One interesting addition, however, which had not been mentioned in the Senior Politi- cal Committee papers, was included in the ministerial declaration in De- cember. Referring to cultural exchanges, the ministers declared that ‘more could be achieved by freer movement of people, ideas, and information between the countries of East and West’.149 The origin of this addition is hard to substantiate, but Takeshi Yamamoto has pointed out that the United States and France were both keen on similar formulations on the eve of the ministerial meeting.150 On the other hand, in the spring of 1972, the West Germans in retrospect claimed the credit for the insertion of this paragraph in the declaration.151 The suggestion of the Political Director of the Auswärtiges Amt to add human contacts as a reaction to the Prague declaration referred to above also speaks for the West German initiative.152 Whether or not the particular reference to freer movement originated from Bonn, it was obvious that the Federal Republic was beginning to step up its efforts in NATO at this time. In January 1970, the Auswärtiges Amt instructed the West German NATO mission to pay increased attention to procedural questions in the CSCE preparations. In order to steer

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the conference in a suitable direction, the West should take the initiative both on content and on procedure.153 These instructions were backed by an intervention from the bureau of Foreign Minister Scheel in March. For the first time in the CSCE context, Scheel gave direct political guidance to his ministry, calling for more activity by the Federal Government in CSCE preparations, in questions of content as well as of procedure.154 In their reaction to Scheel’s instructions, the Auswärtiges Amt officials responsible for the CSCE questions pointed to the importance of coordination of Western positions:

German proposals, were they not previously discussed and agreed within NATO, would be criticised from the West and possibly also be met with suspi- cion from the East. … This leaves us only with the admittedly not very spectacular route of being particularly active and taking the initiative in preparing proposals within NATO.155

This ‘not very spectacular’ route began to be followed as early as Febru- ary, with the circulation in NATO of a working paper on an ‘issue by issue approach to security questions’, the first substantial West German contribution to the Alliance discussion on East–West negotiations. This working paper skilfully combined procedural and substantive elements, arguing that the two could not be separated from each other. In terms of the CSCE agenda, the paper specifically raised MBFR and cultural relations as suitable topics for multilateral negotiations.156 Although a number of other Allies also presented their views on the CSCE in the early spring of 1970, there was a qualitative difference. The FRG went further into discussion of the agenda than others, and was even criticised by some representatives in the SPC for not limiting its contribution to procedural questions alone.157 However, the scope of West German initiatives soon narrowed. The West German CSCE policy in NATO in the spring of 1970 turned out to be a single-issue movement. All West German efforts were focused on MBFR. When it came to the general idea of multilateral East–West negotiations, the balanced force reductions in Europe were the top priority for the FRG. The West Germans were particularly keen to engage in MBFR in order to prevent unilateral troop reductions by the United States.158 In addition, in an interview with the author, Egon Bahr stressed that the West Germans considered the Soviet empire to rest on two pillars: one was ideology, the other ‘missiles and tanks’. The building of the Berlin Wall had already damaged the ideological pillar; MBFR was the means to get at the other pillar.159 The West German Defence Minister Helmut Schmidt was an especially enthusiastic proponent of MBFR, but he also had many supporters in the Auswärtiges Amt.160 Already in the autumn of 1969, the West Germans had argued that the East’s willingness to enter negotiations should be put

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to the test by repeating and strengthening the signal of Reykjavik.161 The Allies had agreed, and MBFR was included in the ‘list of issues’.162 In a meeting with the Soviet Ambassador, who was not at all pleased with the idea, State Secretary Duckwitz had assured him in December 1969 that it was not planned to put the specific MBFR issue on the agenda of a possible CSCE.163 But only two months later the West German NATO Ambassador Grewe launched an initiative aiming to do just that – to turn MBFR into the main theme of a CSCE. At a working breakfast of the NATO Ambassadors in February 1970, Grewe argued that the CSCE, or a series of conferences, should not be reduced to covering vague and general topics such as economic cooperation and trade. Instead, the conferences should be used to discuss genuine security issues. Expressing his personal opinion, Grewe stressed, he therefore called for the West to suggest MBFR as the topic of the first security conference.164 In a further elaboration of his proposal, Grewe pointed out that ‘genuine progress could only be achieved if the first European security conference truly made security in Europe the main topic of negotiations’.165 Grewe had operated without instructions from the capital, but his idea enjoyed support within the government, as was apparent in the joint memorandum drafted by the Auswärtiges Amt and the Defence Ministry for the Federal Security Council (Bundessicherheitsrat)166 in early March. This paper, while highlighting the positive interest of the FRG in a CSCE, stated that such a conference would not fulfil its purpose if the actual security problems of the continent were excluded from it. Therefore, if a CSCE was to be convened, MBFR had to be on its agenda. The Federal Se- curity Council fully endorsed this view.167 Admittedly, there were also differences between Grewe’s position and that of the government: whereas Grewe wanted to limit the first CSCE to covering MBFR alone, the official West German line was to include MBFR in a broader CSCE agenda.168 Moreover, MBFR specialists in the Auswärtiges Amt as well as leading figures in the cabinet and in the Chancellery considered MBFR to be more important than the CSCE for the Federal Republic. From this perspective, too firm a link with the CSCE could jeopardise the prospects ofMBFR negotiations.169 Accordingly, in April the FRG delegation in NATO was instructed not to link MBFR and the CSCE too closely together – force reductions could also be discussed without a security conference. But on the other hand, if a CSCE was to be convened, it was essential to make sure that MBFR was a central issue covered in that framework as well.170 Fol- lowing these lines, the West Germans delivered a memorandum in Brus- sels, suggesting that members of the Alliance should raise MBFR ‘as the main topic of discussion for an initial conference on European security’.171

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The United States had from the outset opposed combining MBFR and the CSCE in any form.172 But during the spring of 1970, the West German insistence in the NATO discussions seemed to pay off. When the NATO Foreign Ministers met in Rome in May 1970, MBFR topped the agenda. The separate MBFR declaration issued by the Foreign Ministers, the so- called Signal of Rome, reinforced the call for force reductions in Europe.173 In the actual communiqué, the ministers listed three broad groups of items that could be dealt with at a CSCE. Firstly, the principles governing relations between states, including the renunciation of force; secondly, the development of international relations with a view to contributing to the freer movement of people, ideas and information and to developing cooperation in the cultural, economic, technical and scientific fields as well as in the field of human environment; and thirdly, the balanced force reductions.174 While the connection between a CSCE and MBFR in the com- muniqué language remained looser than the West Germans would have preferred, it was largely due to West German efforts that MBFR was still included among the topics of a CSCE in the NATO deliberations. After the Rome meeting, the West German approach to the relationship of the CSCE and MBFR was clarified further during the summer of 1970. MBFR was an independent topic which could be discussed before, during or after a CSCE; but if there was a CSCE, MBFR had to be discussed there as well.175 This position was consolidated in the Federal Security Council in October, and from then on consistently repeated in various discussions the West Germans had with their allies.176 For several months, the dominant focus on MBFR had overshadowed West German thinking on other possible elements of the CSCE agenda. But in the summer of 1970, coinciding with the CSCE commitment made in the Bahr Paper in Moscow, West German positions slowly began to change. Instead of focusing exclusively on MBFR as far as the possible agenda of the CSCE was concerned, the original idea of viewing the conference in broad terms, as a long-term process possibly leading to the cov- eted European peace order, was again gaining ground. In speaking notes and background papers of the Auswärtiges Amt, it was soon established as a standard line to take that the CSCE would contribute to safeguarding peace, reducing tension between East and West as well as overcoming inner-German contradictions. This was also an argument used in favour of the conference, in defence of the undertaking to work towards the CSCE laid down in the Bahr Paper.177 As a specific West German position on the CSCE, in addition to a common NATO line, the West German Foreign Ministry highlighted the goal of ‘constructing a security system for Eu- rope as a basis for a European peace order’.178

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This increasingly welcoming attitude to the conference project as such was also visible in the West German reaction to the Warsaw Pact declaration given in Budapest in June 1970.179 The Budapest document of the Warsaw Pact Foreign Ministers was a further step in the communiqué dialogue between the two blocs – on the one hand building on the Prague documents from the preceding October as a continuation of Warsaw Pact deliberations on the CSCE agenda, but on the other essentially a direct reply to the NATO communiqué of Rome. In the West German analysis the Budapest document was definitely a step in the right direction. Al- though the Warsaw Pact did not refer to freer movement at all and the response to the MBFR suggestion was not yet satisfactory, the Auswärtiges Amt read it as seizing many of the substantive suggestions NATO had made in Rome.180 In the NATO discussion on the Budapest document, the West Germans were joined only by the Danes and Norwegians in this positive estimate – all others were distinctly more sceptical, arguing that the Warsaw Pact suggestions were nothing substantially new, only another attempt to undermine Western unity. Further discussions were called for, in order to find a common line on the Warsaw Pact proposals.181 In this respect, an important aspect in the West German CSCE policy was the conscious tendency to treat the Warsaw Pact as a single bloc. The officials in Bonn were well informed about the internal pressures in the Eastern alliance, reflected in the conflicting motives behind the enthusiasm for the CSCE of the individual Warsaw Pact members. If the Soviet Union was interested in consolidating the status quo, the primary mo- tive for the GDR was to achieve international recognition, whereas other ‘satellites’ wanted to use the conference to increase their contacts with the West. Nonetheless, from the spring of 1970 onwards the Auswärtiges Amt consistently acted as if these differences did not exist.182 Dealing with the Warsaw Pact as a unified, monolithic bloc in the CSCE context was in line with the overall Ostpolitik of the Brandt Government. Instead of approach- ing the individual Warsaw Pact countries separately, as the Kiesinger Gov- ernment had attempted, during Brandt’s reign Ostpolitik was primarily conducted via Moscow. Any moves that could be interpreted as encour- agement for dissident members of the Warsaw Pact to act independently would have undermined this approach. In the CSCE context, it translated into a bloc-to-bloc approach, further emphasising the importance of the multilateral preparations within the West. In these Western considerations, for the time being, MBFR continued to be at the top of the West German wish list for topics to be dealt with at a CSCE. But as a sign of the changing perspective, when the NATO institutions reconvened after the summer pause, the West German Ambassador promised that the FRG delegation would soon submit a working paper

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on economic and cultural cooperation. At the same time, he stressed that further study of these elements would be needed in NATO, for example on the free movement of people.183 It was precisely in these fields that the West in general and the Federal Republic in particular were to show a completely new level of activity from the late autumn of 1970 onwards.

Conclusion

The main characteristic of the CSCE policy of the Federal Republic in the period covered in this chapter is that of old-fashioned Realpolitik. The ‘linkage’ approach – using the CSCE as a lever in the Moscow negotiations – was a classic example of tit-for-tat, whereas the main item on the agenda of the possible CSCE the West Germans were interested in was military security in the form of troop reductions. However, on both of these tracks the West German approach was also undergoing fundamental change. Already in 1969–70 the direction of both of these changes was towards more multilateralism at the expense of bilateralism, more ideal- ism at the expense of Realpolitik. The Moscow Treaty was an important watershed in this respect, further speeding up the transformation of West German CSCE policy. As far as the Chancellery-driven ‘linkage’ strategy is concerned, after Bahr’s negotiations in Moscow a large amount of the capital of the bilateral leverage had been spent. But after initial hesitation the Federal Republic adapted to the new situation by turning towards a multilateral linkage – using the potential CSCE in order to achieve progress in the Four-Power Berlin negotiations. Henry Kissinger triumphantly described this situation in retrospect as the moment where the US had ‘harnessed the beast of détente’, making both the CSCE and ratification of the German Eastern Treaties dependent upon a Berlin agreement that met US objectives.184 Seen from the Bonn perspective, this meant that Western multilateralism was the only option left for applying the CSCE linkage strategy, whether directly to the Berlin talks or indirectly to Deutschlandpolitik. Regarding the agenda of the CSCE, the realm of the Auswärtiges Amt, the initial West German preoccupation with MBFR and hard security issues also began to give way to softer elements of East–West cooperation and the broader idea of a European peace order. Here it was clear from the outset that the relevant discussions had to take place in a multilateral forum, first within Western institutions before moving on to the actual conference preparations between East and West and including the neutral countries. In this respect, the first year of the Brandt Government was a learning process for the West Germans in the art of Western multilateral-

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ism. As will be argued in the next chapters, these skills came in useful in the years that followed. For the time being, NATO was the only significant Western forum for the CSCE preparations. But for over a year, NATO had been predomi- nantly reactive, not proactive. With its Prague and Budapest documents, the Warsaw Pact had maintained the initiative in formulating the CSCE agenda. Discussion in the Alliance on the possible CSCE agenda had been surprisingly limited after the onset of Brandt’s Ostpolitik, only really becoming active in the weeks preceding the semi-annual meetings of the Foreign Ministers. It took a full year after the ‘list of issues’ document of 1969, until October 1970, for the NATO Council to commission the political committee to prepare a further substantive report on East–West negotiations.185 A similar passivity was typical of the West German CSCE policy as well. Theoretically, interest in the CSCE agenda was clearly on the rise in the Auswärtiges Amt. But although the possible contents of a security conference were constantly present in the paperwork the ministry produced, with the exception of the MBFR moves in the spring of 1970 its ideas were not yet translated into concrete actions within the Alliance. In fact, there was not a truly coherent CSCE strategy to speak of during the first year of Scheel’s reign in the ministry. A good indication of – and possibly one reason for – this lack of coordination was the fate of the internal CSCE working group in the Foreign Ministry. The original working group had completed its final report by early October 1969, but it was not until No- vember 1970 that this group was reconvened within the Auswärtiges Amt. In the meantime, the period covered in this chapter, Bonn’s approach to the concrete CSCE preparations consisted mostly of uncoordinated actions of individual diplomats. The origin of the West German focus on MBFR as a solo project of Ambassador Grewe was a prime example of this. As will be argued in the following chapter, all of this was to change rap- idly in the late autumn of 1970. Increased Western activity on the CSCE front in NATO as well as in the new framework of European Political Co- operation accelerated the development of the West German CSCE approach towards multilateralism. At the same time, the Auswärtiges Amt started to invest considerably more time, effort and resources into the conference preparations. The substantive value of the CSCE began to surpass the instrumental value – a genuine West German CSCE policy was in the making.

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Notes

1. NARA, RG 59 (1970–73), Box 1703, Rush (Bonn) to Secstate, 6 Jan 1970. 2. PAAA, B40, 181, IIA3, 29 May 1970. 3. AAPD 1969, doc 337, Scheel to embassies, 30 Oct 1969. For the government declaration, see the BWBS website . 4. For a position paper in late October 1969, see for instance PAAA, B40, 179, IIA3, undated. 5. AAPD 1969, doc 333, Ruete, 29 Oct 1969. The letter was never sent in this format. When Brandt actually did write to Stoph in January 1970, the CSCE was not mentioned at all and the letter was substantially shorter than the one proposed by Ruete. See EA 1970, D 205, Brandt to Stoph, 22 Jan 1970. 6. AAPD 1969, doc 343, Müller, 4 Nov 1969; AAPD 1969, doc 362, Sahm, meeting Brandt- Stewart, 14 Nov 1969. 7. PAAA, B150, 164, Pommerening, 3 Nov 1969. 8. PAAA, B150, 165, Ruete, 18 Nov 1969. 9. AAPD 1969, doc 352, meeting Scheel-Schumann, 9 Nov 1969. 10. EA 1969, D 551–2, 31 Oct 1969. 11. TNA, FCO 41/547, Burrows (UK NATO) to FCO, 5 Nov 1969. 12. Haftendorn, Sicherheit und Entspannung, 442. 13. PAAA, B150, 164, Ruete (AA) to embassies, 12 Nov 1969. See also PAAA, B150, 165, Ruete, 28 Nov 1969. 14. Stiftung Archiv der Parteien und Massenorganisationen der DDR im Bundesarchiv (SAPMO-BArch), DY 30/3524, undated (Dec 1969). 15. AAPD 1969, doc 386, Ruete (Natogerma) to AA, 4 Dec 1969; NARA, RG 59 (1967–69), Box 1539, Rogers (US NATO) to State, 5 Dec 1969. 16. AAPD 1969, doc 388, Ruete (Natogerma) to AA, 5 Dec 1969. 17. NATO Communiqués, Declaration of the North Atlantic Council, Brussels, 4–5 Dec 1969. 18. Mayer, ‘National Foreign Policy’, 83. 19. Henry Kissinger, White House Years, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson 1979, 412. For two excellent portrayals of Kissinger, see Jussi M. Hanhimäki, The Flawed Architect: Henry Kissinger and American Foreign Policy, New York: Oxford University Press 2004; Jeremi Suri, Henry Kissinger and the American Century, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press 2007. 20. AAPD 1969, doc 363, Scheel (AA) to Allardt (Moscow), 14 Nov 1969. 21. AdsD, Dep. Bahr, 442, Bahr, 16 Nov 1969; AAPD 1969, doc 365. 22. AAPD 1969, doc 368, meeting Scheel-Tsarapkin, 17 Nov 1969. For van Well’s briefing to the Bonn Group, see NARA, RG 59 (1967–69), Box 1538, Rush (Bonn) to Secstate, 19 Nov 1969. 23. AAPD 1969, doc 370, Brandt to Kosygin, 19 Nov 1969. Similar formulations also in PAAA, B150, 165, Ruete, 18 Nov 1969. 24. Bahr, Zu meiner Zeit, 277–8. 25. PA-DBT, Auswärtiger Ausschuss, 6. Wahlperiode (3104 6/3), Prot. 4, 11 Dec 1969. 26. For the individual instructions for the three Allardt-Gromyko meetings on 8, 11 and 23 Dec 1969, see AAPD 1969, doc 390, Scheel (AA) to Allardt (Moscow), 6 Dec 1969; AAPD 1969, doc 396, Scheel (AA) to Allardt (Moscow), 10 Dec 1969; AAPD 1969, doc 402, Scheel (AA) to Moscow, 17 Dec 1969. See also PA-DBT, 3104 6/3, Prot. 4, 11 Dec 1969.

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27. AAPD 1969, doc 392, Allardt (Moscow) to Scheel (AA), 8 Dec 1969; AAPD 1969, doc 398, Allardt (Moscow) to Scheel (AA), 11 Dec 1969. For Soviet briefings of the East Germans about the meetings, see Dokumente zur Deutschlandpolitik (DzD) VI/1, doc 40, Florin, meeting Winzer-Abrassimow, 11 Dec 1969; DzD VI/1, doc 41, Florin, meeting Winzer- Kusnezow, 15 Dec 1969. 28. PAAA, B150, 166, Allardt (Moscow) to AA, 14 Dec 1969. 29. DzD VI/1, doc 31, Sanne to Bahr, 2 Dec 1969. 30. NARA, RG 59 (1967–69), Box 1539, Fessenden (Bonn) to State, 30 Dec 1969. 31. NARA, RG 59 (1970–73), Box 1703, Rush (Bonn) to State, 6 Jan 1970; NARA, RG 59 (1970–73), Box 1703, Rush (Bonn) to State, 9 Jan 1970. 32. For comments and/or amendments from the Chancellery to Auswärtiges Amt drafts, see PAAA, B150, 166, Ehmke to Scheel, 6 Dec 1969; AdsD, Dep. Bahr, 429A, Bahr to Sahm, 12 Dec 1969; AdsD, Dep. Bahr, 431B, Bahr to Brandt, 16 Dec 1969. 33. AAPD 1969, doc 390, Scheel (AA) to Allardt (Moscow), 6 Dec 1969; PAAA, B150, 166, Ehmke to Scheel, 6 Dec 1969. 34. AAPD 1969, doc 406, Bahr, 22 Dec 1969. 35. AAPD 1970, doc 8, Bahr to Brandt and Ehmke, 14 Jan 1970. 36. AAPD 1970, doc 28, meeting Bahr-Gromyko, 30 Jan 1970. 37. AAPD 1970, doc 33, meeting Bahr-Gromyko, 3 Feb 1970; see also PAAA, B150, 196, Bahr and Allardt (Moscow) to Scheel and Duckwitz (AA), 3 Feb 1970; AdsD, Dep. Bahr, 392, Bahr (Moscow) to Scheel and Duckwitz (AA), 4 Feb 1970. For the Soviet briefing to the East Germans, see DzD VI/1, doc 67, 6 Feb 1970. 38. AAPD 1970, doc 33, meeting Bahr-Gromyko, 3 Feb 1970; AdsD, Dep. Bahr, 392, Bahr (Moscow) to Scheel and Duckwitz (AA), 4 Feb 1970. 39. See, for example, PAAA, B150, 197, Ruete (AA) to Natogerma, 19 Feb 1970. 40. AAPD 1970, doc 80, Grewe (Natogerma) to AA, 27 Feb 1970. 41. For his views on the CSCE, see Grewe, Rückblenden, 671–8. 42. AAPD 1970, doc 87, meeting Bahr-Gromyko, 3 Mar 1970; AAPD 1970, doc 89, Bahr (Moscow) to Scheel and Duckwitz (AA), 4 Mar 1970. 43. AAPD 1970, doc 97, Bahr (Moscow), 7 Mar 1970. 44. AAPD 1970, doc 104, meeting Bahr-Gromyko, 10 Mar 1970; AAPD 1970, doc 97, Bahr (Moscow), 7 Mar 1970. 45. AAPD 1970, doc 114, 11 Mar 1970. 46. PAAA, B150, 199, Stempel (Moscow) to Scheel and Duckwitz (AA), meeting Bahr-Gro- myko, 27 Mar 1970. 47. PA-DBT, 3104 6/3, Prot. 12, 19 Mar 1970. 48. TNA, Records of the Prime Minister’s Office (PREM) 13/3203, meeting Wilson-Brandt, 5 Mar 1970; Willy Brandt: Die Berliner Ausgabe, vol. 6, Ein Volk der guten Nachbarn: Aussen- und Deutschlandpolitik 1966–74, edited by Frank Fischer, Bonn: Dietz 2005, doc 45, 14 Sep 1970. 49. NARA, NSC Country Files, Box 683, Folder 1 [1/2], Cline to Rogers, 7 Apr 1970. 50. TNA, FCO 28/922, Anglo-German talks, 18 June 1970. 51. Sarotte,Dealing with the Devil, 44–5. 52. For the West German and Soviet views on the working paper after the first two rounds, see AAPD 1970, doc 196, Ruete, 5 May 1970. 53. AAPD 1970, doc 218, Groepper, 20 May 1970. 54. EA 1970, D 394–5, 22 May 1970; AAPD 1970, doc 221, 20 May 1970; Zündorf, Die Ostverträge, 29–50. 55. AAPD 1970, doc 232, meeting Scheel-Tsarapkin, 23 May 1970. See also PAAA, B150, 203, von Staden, meeting Brandt-Tsarapkin, 23 May 1970.

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56. AAPD 1970, doc 308, Ritzel, meeting Brandt-Tsarapkin, 14 July 1970. 57. DzD VI/1, doc 178A, Winzer to Ulbricht, 8 Aug 1970. 58. For a thorough analysis of the Moscow Treaty, see Julia von Dannenberg, The Founda- tions of Ostpolitik: The Making of the Moscow Treaty between West Germany and the USSR, Oxford and New York: OUP 2008. 59. Ahlers, 12 Aug 1970, AdG, vol. 6, 5235–6. 60. AAPD 1970, doc 387, Peckert, meeting Brandt-Kosygin, 12 Aug 1970. See also AAPD 1970, doc 396, Pauls, meeting Bahr-Kissinger, 17 Aug 1970. 61. Helmut Allardt, Moskauer Tagebuch: Beobachtungen, Notizen, Erlebnisse, Düsseldorf, Wien: Econ 1973, 83, 293–4. 62. AAPD 1970, doc 274, Grewe (Natogerma) to AA, 19 Jun 1970. See also PAAA, B150, 206, Peckert, 10 July 1970. 63. PAAA, B150, 203, Blumenfeld, 26 May 1970; PAAA, B150, 203, von Treskow, 27 May 1970. See also AAPD 1970, doc 241, Lahn, 29 May 1970. 64. PAAA, B40, 180, Pommerening, 11 Dec 1969. 65. PAAA, B150, 195, van Well to Duckwitz and Scheel, 29 Jan 1970; see also AAPD 1970, doc 11, meeting Scheel-Schumann, 16 Jan 1970; PAAA, B150, 166, von Braun (Paris) to AA, 15 Dec 1969. For President Pompidou’s concerns over Berlin, see Georges-Henri Soutou, ‘The Linkage between European Integration and Détente: The Contrasting Ap- proaches of de Gaulle and Pompidou, 1965 to 1974’, in: Ludlow (ed.), European Integra- tion and the Cold War, 11–35, here 29. 66. For the turn in French thinking, see Marie Pierre Rey, ‘France and the German Question in the Context of Ostpolitik and the CSCE, 1969–1974’, in: Bange and Niedhart (eds.), Helsinki 1975, 53–66. 67. This is how the Soviet embassy in Helsinki briefed the Finnish Foreign Minister of Al- phand’s visit. UKA, 21/159/2. UM:n ja TP:n muistiot, Karjalainen, 4 Feb 1970. 68. UMA, 7B, 11.3, Enckell I (folder II), 11 Apr 1970. 69. PAAA, B150, 201, von Braun (Paris) to AA, 16 Apr 1970. 70. PAAA, B150, 201, Lahn (AA) to Paris, London, Washington, Moscow and Natogerma, 23 Apr 1970. 71. TNA, FCO 41/740, Stewart (FCO) to Bonn, 13 Feb 1970. 72. PAAA, B150, 199, IIA3, 31 Mar 1970. See also PAAA, B150, 200, Menne (AA) to Nato- germa, 10 Apr 1970. 73. NARA, RG 59, Box 1704, Ellsworth (US NATO) to State, 26 Mar 1970. 74. TNA, FCO 41/743, Cradock to Bendall, 15 July 1970. 75. PAAA, B150, 202, Grewe (Natogerma) to AA, 12 May 1970. Concern about public opinion had played a role in the British CSCE positions for quite some time, see for instance PAAA, B150, 195, Wickert (London) to AA, 25 Jan 1970. 76. PAAA, B150, 203, Grewe (Natogerma) to AA, 18 May 1970; PAAA, B150, 203, Behrends, 19 May 1970; PAAA, B150, 203, Grewe (Natogerma) to AA, 21 May 1970; PAAA, B150, 203, Grewe (Natogerma) to AA, 22 May 1970. 77. FRUS 1969–76, vol XXXIX, doc 25, Ellsworth (US NATO) to Kissinger (Washington), 29 May 1970. 78. NATO Communiqués, Final Communiqué of the North Atlantic Council, Rome, 26–27 May 1970. 79. AAPD 1970, doc 244, Lahn (AA) to embassies, 2 June 1970. 80. PAAA, B150, 205, Lahn (AA) to Natogerma, 29 June 1970. 81. NARA, RG 59 (1970–73), Box 1704, Rush (Bonn) to State, 30 June 1970. See also TNA, FCO 28/922, Anglo-German talks, 18 June 1970; NARA, RG 59 (1970–73), Box 1704, Ells- worth (US NATO) to State, 24 July 1970.

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82. PAAA, B1, 354, von Alten, 23 June 1970. 83. See for example AAPD 1970, doc 279, von Staden, meeting Brandt-Brosio, 24 June 1970. 84. AAPD 1970, doc 501, Sahm, 29 Oct 1970. For the Soviet origin of this step, see Sarotte, Dealing with the Devil, 84–6. 85. AAPD 1970, doc 574, Eitel, meeting Bahr-Kohl, 27 Nov 1970. 86. For a good case study of the dominant role of the Chancellery, see von Dannenberg, The Foundations of Ostpolitik. 87. Schollwer’s manuscript, which he kindly made available to the author, highlights the ‘indispensable’ role of Frank in supporting the inexperienced Foreign Minister Scheel from the summer of 1970 onwards. Wolfgang Schollwer, ‘Tagebücher, Band VII, Kampf um die Verträge (1970–72)’, unpublished manuscript. 88. AAPD 1970, doc 327, meeting Scheel-Tsarapkin, 22 July 1970; AAPD 1970, doc 353, Scheel, meeting Scheel-Gromyko, 2 Aug 1970; see also PAAA, B150, 209, Scheel (Mos- cow) to AA, meeting Scheel-Gromyko, 3 Aug 1970. 89. PAAA, B150, 212, von Staden, 28 Sep 1970; PAAA, B150, 213, van Well to IIA3, 5 Oct 1970. 90. ACDP, I-356, K014/4, Moersch to Schröder, 5 Oct 1970; PAAA, B40, 181, von Groll, 28 Oct 1970. 91. AAPD 1970, doc 460, von Staden, meeting Scheel-Tepavac, 11 Oct 1970; AAPD 1970, doc 462, van Well, meeting Scheel-Rush, 12 Oct 1970; AAPD 1970, doc 464, Hartmann, meeting Scheel-Tsarapkin, 13 Oct 1970. 92. AAPD 1970, doc 467, Grewe (Natogerma) to AA, 13 Oct 1970. 93. PAAA, B40, 185, Pommerening and Dahlhoff, 20 Aug 1970. 94. AAPD 1970, doc 413, Gehlhoff (AA) to Natogerma, 2 Sep 1970; TNA, FCO 41/743, Rich- ards (Bonn) to FCO, 10 Sep 1970; NARA, RG 59, Box 1705, Rush (Bonn) to State, 12 Sep 1970. 95. TNA, FCO 41/744, Pemberton-Pigott (UK NATO) to FCO, 28 Sep 1970; NARA, RG 59, Box 2263, Ellsworth (US NATO) to State, 26 Sep 1970. 96. NARA, RG 59, Box 1705, Rush (Bonn) to State, 11 Sep 1970. 97. AAPD 1970, doc 502, Hartmann, meeting Scheel-Gromyko, 30 Oct 1970. See also NARA, RG 59, Box 2283, Rush (Bonn) to State, 5 Nov 1970 and AdsD, Dep. Bahr, 429A, Frank, 29 Oct 1970. 98. AdsD, Dep. Bahr, 398A, Bahr to Sahm, 3 Nov 1970. 99. NARA, RG 59, Box 1705, Rush (Bonn) to State, telegram 13160, 10 Nov 1970. For the original German text, see TNA, FCO 41/746, Mineeff (Bonn) to Gladstone (FCO), 12 Nov 1970. 100. TNA, FCO 41/746, Peck (UK NATO) to FCO, 18 Nov 1970; NARA, RG 59, Box 3146, Vest (US NATO) to State, 18 Nov 1970; TNA, FCO 41/746, German Delegation, 18 Nov 1970; NARA, RG 59, Box 1705, Vest (US NATO) to State, 18 Nov 1970. 101. NARA, NSC Files, Box H-49, Folder 4, Senior Review Group, MBFR, 11/23/70, Sonnen- feldt to Kissinger, 20 Nov 1970. 102. NARA, RG 59, Box 1705, Vest (US NATO) to State, 16 Nov 1970; NARA, RG 59, Box 1705, Rogers (State) to Bonn and US NATO, 20 Nov 1970. 103. PAAA, B150, 217, van Well, 19 Nov 1970. On the sensitivities of other Allies regarding Bonn Group discussions on issues beyond Germany and Berlin, see also Martin J. Hil- lenbrand, Fragments of Our Time: Memoirs of a Diplomat, Athens: University of Georgia Press 1998, 281. 104. Author’s interview with Hans Otto Bräutigam, 22 March 2004.

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105. On the British focus on the EC, see Jonathan Wright, ‘Introduction’, in: Jeremy Noakes, Peter Wende and Jonathan Wright (eds.), Britain and Germany in Europe 1949–1990, Ox- ford: Oxford University Press 2002, 1–24. 106. DBPO III/I, doc 57, Douglas-Home to D. Wilson, 1 Dec 1970. See also Roger Morgan, ‘Willy Brandt’s “Neue Ostpolitik”: British Perceptions and Positions, 1969–1975’, in: Adolf M. Birke, Magnus Brechtken and Alaric Searle (eds.), An Anglo-German Dialogue: The Munich Lectures on the History of International Relations, München: Saur 2000, 179– 200, here 190. 107. Andreas Wilkens, Der unstete Nachbar: Frankreich, die deutsche Ostpolitik und die Berliner Vier-Mächte-Verhandlungen, 1969–74, München: Oldenbourg 1990, 47–8. The Franco-Soviet declaration issued at the end of Pompidou’s visit (6–13 Oct 1970) is published in EA 1970, D 512–8. See also Georges-Henri Soutou, ‘Präsident Georges Pompidou und die Ostpo- litik’, in: Gottfried Niedhart, Detlef Junker and Michael W. Richter (eds.), Deutschland in Europa: nationale Interessen und internationale Ordnung im 20. Jahrhundert, Mannheim: Palatium 1997, 171–9; Yamamoto, ‘The Road to the CSCE’, 150–4. 108. PAAA, B20, 1601, IIA3, 26 Nov 1970; PAAA, B20, 1601, IIA3, 26 Nov 1970; PAAA, B130, 2667, Hansen to Büro StS, 25 Nov 1970. 109. NARA, RG 59, Box 1705, Rush (Bonn) to State, 19 Nov 1970; see also NARA, RG 59, Box 1705, REUS-39, 23 Nov 1970. 110. PAAA, B150, 219, 2 Dec 1970; TNA, FCO 41/746, Beith (UK Brussels) to FCO, 2 Dec 1970. 111. PAAA, B130, 2667, Hansen to IIA1 and IIA3, 3 Dec 1970. 112. AAPD 1970, doc 585, Simon (AA) to embassies, 3 Dec 1970. 113. Scheel, Schumann, Douglas-Home and Rogers had agreed on it already at their traditional quadripartite meeting before the NATO ministerial meeting. AAPD 1970, doc 583, Boss (Natogerma) to AA, 3 Dec 1970; TNA, FCO 33/1114, quadripartite meeting, 2 Dec 1970. 114. PAAA, B150, 219, Lahn and Grewe (Natogerma) to AA, 3 Dec 1970; PAAA, B150, 219, Grewe (Natogerma) to AA, 4 Dec 1970; AAPD 1970, doc 586, Grewe (Natogerma) to AA, 4 Dec 1970. See also PA-DBT, 3104 6/3, Prot. 29, 17 Dec 1970. 115. AAPD 1970, doc 586, Grewe (Natogerma) to AA, 4 Dec 1970; PAAA, B150, 219, von Groll, 11 Dec 1970. 116. PAAA, B150, 219, van Well (AA) to Paris and Moscow, 7 Dec 1970. For the Belgian me- diation, see also NARA, NSC Files, Box H-57, Folder 1, SRG Meeting, NSSM 121 NATO, 5/14/71, Sonnenfeldt to Kissinger, 10 May 1971. 117. NATO Communiqués, Final Communiqué of the North Atlantic Council in Ministerial Session, Brussels 3–4 Dec 1970. 118. UMA, 7B, 11.2, NATO-maiden kokoukset, Väänänen (Bonn) to UM, 10 Dec 1970. 119. Utrikesdepartementets arkiv (UDA), HP1, Ct 285, Montan (Bonn) to UD, 22 Dec 1970. 120. Götz Freiherr von Groll,who was to become an eminent figure in the formulation of the West German CSCE policy, succeeded Horst Pommerening as the head of the Auswär- tiges Amt unit IIA3 (‘structural questions of the East’) at the end of 1970. 121. PAAA, B40, 184, von Groll, 13 Jan 1971. 122. AdsD, Dep. Bahr, 396, Bahr to Pommerening, 1 Sep 1969. See Chapter 2 above. 123. ULA 1970, Press statement of Foreign Minister Karjalainen, 23 Feb 1970. For a complete itinerary of Enckell’s tour between Feb 1970 and Sep 1971, see Sicherheit und Zusam- menarbeit in Europa (KSZE), doc 109. 124. Author’s interview with Genscher, Berlin, 20 January 2005. 125. PAAA, B40, 185, 6 Oct 1969. 126. AdsD, Dep. Bahr, 398A, BK, 3 Nov 1969.

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127. AdsD, Dep. Focke, 191, Focke to Minister, Bundeskanzler, Bahr, 10 March 1970; AdsD, Dep. Focke, 191, Focke, ‘Überlegungen zu dem Papier “Überlegungen zur Aussenpoli- tik einer künftigen Bundesregierung”’, undated. Focke’s suggested task force would have included herself and Bahr from the Chancellery, Dahrendorf, Duckwitz and Frank from the Auswärtiges Amt and Arndt from the Economics Ministry. 128. BArch, B136, 6419 (1), Schauer to Sahm and Focke, 14 April 1970. For the limitations of Focke’s influence in the Chancellery, see Möckli, European Foreign Policy, 41. 129. AAPD 1970, doc 291, meeting Brandt-Pompidou, 3 July 1970; AAPD 1970, doc 487, Sahm, meeting Brandt-Debré, 23 Oct 1970. 130. AAPD 1970, doc 197, Oncken, 5 May 1970. 131. EA 1969, D 551–2, 31 Oct 1969; EA 1970, D 89–90, 31 Oct 1969; AAPD 1969, doc 368, meeting Scheel-Tsarapkin, 17 Nov 1969; PAAA, B150, 165, Gnodtke (Natogerma) to AA, 21 Nov 1969. 132. PAAA, B150, 164, Pommerening, 3 Nov 1969. 133. PAAA, B150, 165, Ruete, 18 Nov 1969. 134. PAAA, B1, 350, Ruete, meeting Scheel-Tsarapkin, 27 Nov 1969. 135. AAPD 1969, doc 403, meeting Duckwitz-Tsarapkin, 19 Dec 1969. 136. PAAA, B150, 165, Ruete, 28 Nov 1969. 137. AAPD 1969, doc 373, 21 Nov 1969; PAAA, B150, 165, Ruete, 28 Nov 1969. 138. AAPD 1969, doc 386, Ruete (Brussels) to AA, 4 Dec 1969. 139. This view has not changed with the passing of time. In answering a standard question in the author’s interviews with West German officials and politicians, not a single one of them recognised in retrospect that public opinion would have had any impact on West German CSCE decision-making. 140. NARA, RG 59 (1967–69), Box 1539, Fessenden (Bonn) to State, 30 Dec 1969. 141. Author’s interview with Rodric Braithwaite, 7 Jan 2004; PAAA, B150, 195, Wickert (Lon- don) to AA, 25 Jan 1970; PAAA, B150, 196, Gnodtke (Natogerma) to AA, 13 Feb 1970. 142. AAPD 1970, doc 240, Duckwitz (Rome) to AA, 27 May 1970. 143. PAAA, B150, 199, IIA3, 31 Mar 1970. 144. See Wolfrum, Die geglückte Demokratie, 286. 145. VdDB, VI/33, 25 Feb 1970, 1559, 1629. 146. NATOA, C-M(69)34, List of issues for possible negotiation with the East, 14 July 1969. 147. NATOA, C-M(69)46, List of issues for possible negotiation with the East, 21 Oct 1969. 148. PAAA, B150, 161, Ritzel to Boss (BK-Amt), 23 Sep 1969; NATOA, C-R(69)43, 24 Oct 1969. 149. NATO Communiqués, Declaration of the North Atlantic Council, Brussels, 4–5 Dec 1969. 150. Yamamoto, ‘The Road to the CSCE’, 91–2. 151. PAAA, B28, 109307, Deutsche Delegation, 17 Mar 1972; TNA, FCO 28/1679, Note by the German Delegation (NATO), 7 Apr 1972. 152. PAAA, B1, 350, Ruete, meeting Scheel-Tsarapkin, 27 Nov 1969. 153. PAAA, B150, 194, Ruete (AA) to Natogerma, 12 Jan 1970. 154. PAAA, B150, 199, Hofmann to Duckwitz and Lahn, 23 Mar 1970. 155. PAAA; B150, 199, Pommerening, 25 Mar 1970; PAAA, B150, 200, Lahn to Scheel and Duckwitz, 3 Apr 1970. 156. PAAA, B150, 197, Ruete (AA) to Natogerma, 19 Feb 1970; TNA, FCO 41/747, German Delegation, 20 Feb 1970. 157. TNA, FCO 41/747, Wilcock (UK NATO) to Elam (FCO), 27 Feb 1970. 158. Bluth, The Two Germanies, 120–46. 159. Author’s interview with Bahr.

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160. TNA, FCO 33/1015, Jackling (Bonn) to FCO, 21 Feb 1970. See also Yamamoto, ‘The Road to the CSCE’, 103–8. 161. PAAA, B150, 161, IIA3, Sep 1969; B150, 164, Grewe (Natogerma) to AA, 6 Nov 1969. 162. NATOA, C-M(69)34, List of issues for possible negotiation with the East, 14 July 1969; NATOA, C-M(69)46, List of issues for possible negotiation with the East, 21 Oct 1969. 163. AAPD 1969, doc 403, meeting Duckwitz-Tsarapkin, 19 Dec 1969. 164. PAAA, B150, 197, Grewe (Natogerma) to AA, 26 Feb 1970. 165. AAPD 1970, doc 80, Grewe (Natogerma) to AA, 27 Feb 1970. 166. A specific cabinet committee responsible for security policy issues. 167. AAPD 1970, doc 83, AA and BMVg to BSR, 2 Mar 1970; AAPD 1970, doc 94, Dahren- dorf, 6 Mar 1970. 168. NARA, RG 59 (1970–73), Box 1704, Ellsworth (US NATO) to State, 5 Mar 1970. 169. AAPD, doc 108, meeting Roth-Richardson, 11 Mar 1970; AAPD, doc 151, Duckwitz (Washington) to AA, 10 Apr 1970; AdsD, Dep. Bahr, 343A, Bahr to Duckwitz, 13 Apr 1970; PA-DBT, 3104 6/3, Prot. 13, 16 Apr 1970. 170. PAAA, B150, 201, Duckwitz (AA) to Natogerma, 16 Apr 1970. 171. PAAA, B150, 200, Working Paper for NATO Council Meeting, undated. For the German version of this text, see AAPD 1970, doc 160, IIB2, 16 Apr 1970. 172. PAAA, B150, 198, Behrends, 3 Mar 1970; PAAA, B150, 198, Pauls (Washington) to AA, 4 Mar 1970. 173. NATO Communiqués, Declaration on Mutual and Balanced Force Reductions, North Atlantic Council, Rome, 26–27 May 1970; see also Bluth, The Two Germanies, 129. For a detailed account of the negotiations leading to the Rome meeting, see Yamamoto, ‘The Road to the CSCE’, 108–19. 174. NATO Communiqués, Final Communiqué, North Atlantic Council, Rome, 26–27 May 1970. 175. AAPD 1970, doc 303, Ederer, 10 July 1970. 176. AAPD 1970, doc 452, AA and Bundesministerium für Verteidigung (BMVg) to Bundes- sicherheitsrat (BSR), 5 Oct 1970; AAPD 1970, doc 484, von Staden (AA) to Natogerma, 22 Oct 1970. 177. PAAA, B40, 181, IIA3, 29 May 1970; PAAA, B40, 196, IIA3, 14 July 1970. 178. PAAA, B40, 181, IIA3, 15 July 1970. 179. EA 1970, D 321–4. For the impact of this document, see Békés, ‘The Warsaw Pact and the CSCE Process’. 180. PAAA, B150, 205, Lahn (AA) to Natogerma, 29 June 1970; PAAA, B150, 206, Allardt (Moscow) to AA, 7 July 1970. 181. AAPD 1970, doc 290, Boss (Natogerma) to AA, 1 July 1970. 182. In more detail, see Petri Hakkarainen, ‘A Monolithic Bloc or Individual Actors? West German Perceptions of the Warsaw Pact in the CSCE Process, 1969–72’, in: Carla Meneguzzi Rostagni (ed.), The Helsinki Process: A Historical Reappraisal, Padova: CEDAM 2005, 63–73. 183. TNA, FCO 41/744, Pemberton-Pigott (UK NATO) to FCO, 28 Sep 1970; NARA, RG 59 (1970–73), Box 2263, Ellsworth (US NATO) to State, 26 Sep 1970. 184. Kissinger, White House Years, 534. 185. PAAA, B150, 214, Grewe (Natogerma) to AA, 14 Oct 1970.

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